Comment by ramesh31
5 years ago
I have long suspected Grammarly as a massive undercover FSB operation to monitor the west. The amount of marketing push behind the product never made sense otherwise, and their corporate HQ is in Ukraine.
Even if you don't buy the conspiracy theory, the cold hard truth now is that those servers will be under Russian jurisdiction within a month.
I have thought that one of the most effective spyware tools would be a really good open source library that most people will use without really knowing what it does and it sends your secrets to some bad government somewhere or at least gives them a master kill switch if they want to DDoS everyone.
The more people there are using an open source library the more likely it is that someone is going to take the time to see exactly what it does and any unexpected network traffic (sending data to some bad government) will sound the alarm much faster. The most effective spyware tools are things like cell phones, facebook, Windows, and Google. They encourage people to spill their own secrets and make it difficult if not impossible to use them while protecting your privacy in any meaningful way.
Their corporate HQ is in the US, and they are hosted on AWS.
They have a development office in Ukraine, too, but they have evacuated. Even if Russia takes over they won't get access to your writing.