Detect tower · floor
Is Grammarly safe, and who holds your text now?
People asking is Grammarly safe are almost never asking about viruses. They are asking a sharper question that the word “safe” hides: this thing reads everything I type, so where does it go, who keeps it, and is it being used to build something.
The answer is available, it is specific, and it changed recently in a way that almost nothing written about this subject has caught up with. So start with the change, because it determines which document you should be reading.
Not a broken link and not a mistake. The policy that governs your text opens by describing the
company as “(formerly Grammarly) and our subsidiaries (such as Grammarly Inc.)”, and states
that it “covers our products, including those offered as ‘Grammarly’, ‘Docs’ (formerly known as
‘Coda’), ‘Superhuman Go’, and ‘Superhuman Mail’”. One policy, several products, a different name
on the door.Where Grammarly’s privacy policy actually goes, checked on 21 August 2026
This matters for a practical reason rather than a dramatic one. If you went looking for Grammarly’s privacy policy, you would end up reading Superhuman’s, and if you had bookmarked an older summary of Grammarly’s terms — including most of the pages currently ranking for this question — you would be reading about a document that no longer governs anything.
Superhuman’s privacy policy, effective 6 July 2026, read on 21 August 2026. Quoted rather
than summarised, because summaries of privacy policies are where the meaning goes missing. Read together, that is neither a scandal nor a clean bill of health. It is an ordinary commercial
arrangement, written down more honestly than most — and it involves your text being used to train
models unless you go and say otherwise.What the policy actually commits to
So: is it safe? The question only becomes answerable once you replace it with a better one, which is safe for what. Three situations, and the honest answer differs in each.
Personal writing. Emails, applications, essays about your own life. The arrangement above is the one you are accepting, and for most people it is an acceptable trade for a tool that genuinely improves their writing. If you would rather your sentences not become training material, the control exists and turning it off costs you nothing.
Work under an obligation. This is where the answer changes, and it changes hard. If you have signed a confidentiality agreement, handle client material, or work with anything regulated — legal drafts, patient records, unreleased financials, unpublished research — the relevant question is not whether the company is trustworthy. It is whether pasting that text into any third-party service is permitted by the agreement you signed. Very often it is not, and the tool’s privacy policy has no bearing on that at all. Your employer’s policy decides it, and the enterprise version of a product usually exists precisely because the consumer version does not satisfy it.
Student work. A separate issue again, and one people conflate with privacy. The risk here is not that your essay leaks; it is that heavy suggestion-taking on a graded piece of writing may fall foul of an academic integrity policy that says the words must be yours. That is a rules question rather than a security question, and the floor on where the line sits covers it.
What to actually do, in order. Open your account settings and find the training control, because it is the only lever on this page that changes anything and it takes under a minute. Then decide, once, what you are willing to paste — a rule of your own is more reliable than judging every document as it arrives. If work material is involved, check your employer’s policy before the tool’s, because that is the one with consequences attached. And treat the browser extension as the widest part of the surface: it sees far more fields than the ones you consciously use it on.
One thing worth saying plainly, because this subject attracts more alarm than it deserves. Nothing quoted above is unusual. Nearly every free writing tool is funded the same way and states similar terms in similar language, and this company has written down a clearer commitment on selling user content than most of its competitors have. The reason to read the policy is not that this one is worse. It is that almost nobody reads any of them, and the differences between them are exactly where the decision lives.
Every quotation above carries the date the document was read, and the policy itself carries an effective date of 6 July 2026. Privacy policies change without announcement, and a page about them that does not say when it was written is not telling you enough to act on.
Where to start
Four ways in.
- “I want to turn off training on my writing.”
- Read the settings floors in the tools
- “I use it for work and I am not sure I am allowed.”
- That is work and confidentiality
- “Will this get me in trouble at university?”
- Go to school and university
- “Is there a version that does not do this?”
- See the alternatives
The tools
What each writing tool says it keeps and trains on, quoted with the date rather than summarised. Policies change quietly, so a summary without a date is worth very little.
Work and confidentiality
The situation where the tool’s own policy stops being the document that decides. What you signed matters more than what they published.
School and university
A rules question rather than a security one, and the two get confused constantly. Using a tool is not the same as breaking a policy, and neither is it automatically fine.
The alternatives
The honest options if the arrangement above is not one you want, including the one nobody sells because there is no money in it.
What this tower will not do
It will not tell you the tool is dangerous. Nothing in the policy supports that, and saying it would be the easiest traffic on this page and the least honest.
It will not tell you it is fine either. Whether it is fine depends on what you paste into it, and that is a question about your obligations rather than about the software.
And it will not carry an affiliate link to a writing tool, which for this particular search is one of the better-paid links on the island — the coupon site currently on page one is there for a reason. What holds instead is simple: every quotation on this page is taken from the current privacy policy, with the date it was read and the date the policy took effect.
Where this page got its facts
- Superhuman — Privacy Policy, effective 6 July 2026, the document reached by following grammarly.com/privacy-policy, covering the products offered as Grammarly, Docs, Superhuman Go and Superhuman Mail — superhuman.com, read 21 August 2026.
Written by Alberto Gulotta
Founder and editor of AI Tools Primer, writing from Palermo, Italy. Thirty-five years of taking computers apart, starting with a Commodore 64 — the long version is on the about page.
Something wrong on this page? Write to aitoolsprimer@gmail.com and it gets fixed.
Written on 21 August 2026.
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