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News recently came out that Facebook bought Giphy. But what is Giphy? AND What does Facebook do with Giphy? Why did you buy it?
It is very likely that many of you have read the news, we always try to do not write hot articles precisely to try to get a clear idea of what is happening around us. We can also afford it because This is an informative blog and absolutely not for profit. Therefore we just want to tell you something, not come first with catchy titles.
What does Facebook do with Giphy?
However, many have asked themselves the question. What does Facebook do with Giphy that it paid 400 million dollars for??
Giphy is one of the most important gif archives (the other is Tenor That It's from Google ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) used by many messaging applications including Signal and Telegram. And obviously, Whatsapp. Many therefore speculated that this was a move to check everyone's messages. In fact, we'll tell you right away: our privacy, at least on this one, is quite safe. At least for that matter Signal And Telegram. Signal Indeed As of now nothing of ours passes to Giphy. And it the same also happens with Telegram. Telegram he also added that an operation is already underway to completely detach yourself from Giphy (well done! 👍).
So at least on this front we have nothing to fear. Facebook didn't buy Giphy to read our conversations, they will not receive our IP addresses or pieces of our conversations.
However Facebook will know that someone used that gif on Giphy and consequently it seems plausible to us this article Of Owen Williams on Medium.
Facebook and the power of gifs
Basically, in summary, it says that Facebook will use Giphy usage data to its advantage (and up until now, we suspected it too). Facebook, thanks to a simple gif, will be able to know a lot about who sent it. always second Owen WilliamsFor example, within Giphy's shared gifs there is a small piece of code (Javascript) that lets the company know where the image is uploaded. Where, how and how much it is shared and even a "tracking identifier" that will follow the user.
Scared huh? How many horrible things can be done with a gif. Don't worry though, as we anticipated if you use Signal and Telegram you are safe from all this. Doesn't that seem like yet another good reason to send WhatsApp to hell and gang?
Giphy is now from Facebook, Tenor is from Google. We are surrounded.
Unfortunately Giphy is present almost everywhere and there are very few that care about user privacy like Signal and Telegram. So Facebook's purchase of Giphy is definitely horrible news on the privacy front. From today when we use a gif within many social networks or messaging apps we will be giving away precious data to either Google or Facebook.
We end the article with the last quote from the article in question:
While you may successfully block trackers like the Facebook ad pixel following you around online, or even delete your Facebook account, the majority of us wouldn't suspect we're being monitored when we're sending funny images to friends.
Owen Williams on Medium
While you can block successfully Trackers like the Facebook advertising pixel that follows you everywhere online or even deleting your Facebook account, most of us wouldn't suspect we're being tracked when we send funny pictures to friends.
If you want to learn more about the topic you can read the article on Medium or this article on Arstechnica.
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