Does Grammarly Read Your Emails? What the Privacy Policy Actually Says
August 10, 2026
Most users assume their grammar checker is just fixing typos. It’s doing a lot more than that.
I was drafting a sensitive email to my attorney—details about a contract dispute, confidential numbers, strategy we hadn’t disclosed yet—when I realized I’d had Grammarly’s browser extension running the whole time.
The email had been “processed.” Every word of it.
I went and actually read Grammarly’s privacy policy that afternoon. What I found made me uninstall the extension.
What Grammarly’s Privacy Policy Actually Says
Grammarly’s terms and privacy documentation use careful language. The word “process” appears repeatedly. Let’s unpack what that means in practice.
From Grammarly’s Privacy Policy:
“To provide the Grammarly service, we must process content you submit to the Service… This content may include text you type or paste, documents you upload or create in Grammarly Editor, feedback we provide, user settings and preferences, and other information about how you interact with the Service.”
Translation: Every sentence you type while Grammarly is active is transmitted to and processed on Grammarly’s servers.
Their enterprise documentation adds important nuance: enterprise accounts can opt for “no data retention”—meaning content is processed on their servers but not stored afterward. Personal and free accounts have no equivalent guarantee.
The policy also notes:
“We may share your information with third parties in limited circumstances, including… with our affiliates, service providers, and business partners.”
Grammarly was acquired by Quillbot’s parent company in 2023, and like all cloud services, uses third-party infrastructure (AWS, Google Cloud). Each hop is another surface area.
“Process” vs. “Store”—Why the Distinction Matters Less Than You Think
Grammarly and similar tools often emphasize that they don’t store your personal text long-term. But the moment your text leaves your device, several things happen:
- Transmission: Your words travel over a network, even over HTTPS
- Server ingestion: They hit Grammarly’s infrastructure, where they’re briefly held in memory
- Model inference: The grammar model runs on their servers, using your text as input
- Logging: Most production systems log API requests for debugging—which can include payload data
- Return trip: The corrected text comes back
Even if the text is deleted from their database after processing, it existed on their infrastructure. For most users this is an acceptable tradeoff. For some, it isn’t.
Who Should Actually Care
The “I have nothing to hide” argument doesn’t apply to everyone equally. Here’s who faces the most risk:
Lawyers and legal professionals: Attorney-client privilege is a cornerstone of the legal system. Transmitting privileged communications to a third-party cloud service creates genuine legal exposure. Many law firms explicitly prohibit AI writing tools for exactly this reason.
Journalists and researchers: Source protection is fundamental to journalism. A reporter drafting a story about a whistleblower—with details of the source, the documents, the timeline—is creating a record that shouldn’t leave their device.
Healthcare workers: HIPAA governs what can and cannot be shared with third parties. Patient information in clinical notes runs real compliance risk if processed by a cloud grammar tool.
HR professionals and executives: Employment disputes, performance reviews, compensation discussions, M&A activity, unreleased financial data—the full range of sensitive corporate communications.
Anyone writing to their doctor, therapist, or financial advisor: These conversations feel private. Most people would be surprised to learn they’re being processed in the cloud.
The Technical Architecture Problem
Here’s the thing: Grammarly’s approach is not negligent. It’s the natural result of how grammar checking was built.
Traditional and current-generation grammar checkers are statistically-based models trained and run on servers. The models are large. Running them in a browser, at scale, on every user’s device, wasn’t practical—until recently.
The same advances in local AI that let you run LLMs on a laptop now make it possible to run a capable grammar model entirely in a browser. No network request. No server. No cloud.
This is what Typlx does.
How Local Grammar Checking Works
Typlx ships a fine-tuned grammar model that downloads to your browser on first install. After that:
- When you type, inference runs locally on your CPU/GPU using WebAssembly
- No text is transmitted—not to Typlx’s servers, not to anyone’s servers
- The architecture makes cloud transmission technically impossible, not just a policy promise
- You can disconnect from the internet after installing and it still works
The tradeoff is a brief initial download (a few seconds on first run) and slightly higher memory usage compared to a thin cloud-client extension. For most users, this is a trivially acceptable tradeoff for genuine privacy.
Because Typlx is open-source (MIT license), you don’t have to take our word for it. The source code is public. Anyone can audit exactly what the extension does and does not transmit.
The Open-Source Verification Model
Privacy policies are promises. Code is proof.
When Typlx says “your text never leaves your browser,” that claim is verifiable by anyone with a browser and developer tools—you can watch network requests in real time and see nothing goes out. Or read the source. Or fork it and run your own version.
This is what “privacy by design” actually means: an architecture where the private behavior is enforced by technical constraints, not policy language.
Practical Takeaways
If you use Grammarly for everyday writing with no sensitive content, the risk is likely low. But consider:
- Pause Grammarly for sensitive documents. Most people don’t realize you can disable it per-tab or site.
- Understand what “enterprise” means. Free and personal accounts have different data handling than paid enterprise plans.
- Audit your browser extensions. Grammar tools aren’t the only extension transmitting your keystrokes.
- Consider a local alternative. For anyone writing sensitive content regularly, the architecture of a local grammar checker removes the risk entirely.
Try a Grammar Checker That Can’t Read Your Emails
Typlx is free, open-source, and runs entirely in your browser. Chrome, Firefox, iOS, and Android.
Typlx is an open-source, privacy-first grammar checker. All grammar checking runs locally in your browser. Your text never leaves your device.