What might not be obvious, however, is that each search and GIF you send with Giphy is also a “beacon” that allows the company to track how and where the image is being shared, as well as the sentiment the image expresses. Giphy wraps each of its animated GIFs in a special format that helps the image load faster, and also embeds a tiny piece of Javascript that lets the company know where the image is being loaded, as well as a tracking identifier that helps follow your browsing across the web.
The sad irony is that many of these GIFs were crowdsourced.
Replied to How Facebook Could Use Giphy to Collect Your Data by Aaron Davis
I wonder how this will affect folk like myself who have used the Giffy API to do daft things, like Gif the Dub, for fun and certainly no profit.
https://johnjohnston.neocities.org/
Not sure John, but that is a pretty awesome little site.
Thank Aaron, I enjoyed making it. Alway though it had some sorto weird potential.