Grammarly installed without admin privileges?

[Deep_Thought]

I have a client who has a user that insists on using Grammarly. I suspect it's been causing various performance issues and had removed it. I've since discovered it's been reinstalled, even though the user is a standard user and does not have admin permissions. I did a test install on my macOS VM and could indeed go through the installer without authenticating. It only asks for credentials when trying to turn on accessibility in Sys prefs.

The app appears in Launchpad, and in the user's Application's folder, along with files in ~/Library/App Support, ~/Library/Caches, ~/Library/LaucnhAgents, ~/Library/Preferences and a couple of others.

This raises a few alarm bells - should it? I'm sure Grammarly itself isn't malicious, but seeing as I can run the application without having to authenticate does seem a little concerning.

 

[p33t3r]

As long as it is only installed in the user's folders, such as ~/Applications, it doesn't need authentication. Most apps want to install themselves into /Applications, and that's why authentication is needed.

 

[chrfr]

The app appears in Launchpad, and in the user's Application's folder, along with files in ~/Library/App Support, ~/Library/Caches, ~/Library/LaucnhAgents, ~/Library/Preferences and a couple of others.

Users have full control over their home folders, and that's where all this stuff is. If you truly need to restrict what apps users can run you need to implement management tools which do that.