Microsoft bans Grammarly because of security concerns

“Microsoft has also banned Grammarly inside the company, which is a writing and grammar-checking app that can monitor every keystroke. “The Grammarly Office add-in and browser extensions should not be used on the Microsoft network because they are able to access Information Rights Management (IRM) protected content within emails and documents,” according to the leaked list.”

Microsoft also prohibits employees from using Kapersky security software, and it discourages employees from using Amazon Web Services, Google Docs, PagerDuty, and the cloud version of GitHub (despite their owning GitHub!), according to GeekWire. Some for security reasons, some for competitive reasons. For example Slack use is banned, as it’s a competitor to Microsoft Teams.

I disabled the Grammarly Safari extension in Safari because I found it invasive and caused some issues. I go to the website if I want to check my writing. I don’t need it in every web form I fill out in Safari.

The fact that they made an iOS keyboard instead of an app is also troubling.

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Makes sense. Fun fact: you used to be able to put in an email address of another company’s domain when signing up for Slack. It wouldn’t actually let you see the chat, but you could see the channels used by that company if they already had Slack set up and had configured it to auto-allow people from the same email domain. Microsoft had tons of channel names viewable this way including some terms that were presumably product code names. :slight_smile:

Since then they’ve obviously moved to steams and Slack has fixed that onboarding user flow.

We prefer self-hosted (Gitlab) as well because it’s a little too easy to make private code on github.com public inadvertently or maliciously. My employers are too small for this to happen, but it seems like it would be inevitable with thousands of engineers.