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Giphy is sharing your IP address and private data to 816 partners
- lagniappe 3y agoGiven the valuation rollercoaster, and the shutterstock acquisition, this is no surprise.
- blantonl 3y agoData brokerage is big business, and the revenue share is significant enough for many businesses to hold their nose, turn their head, and sign on.
- Pesthuf 3y agoWe value your privacy. That's why we share every little piece of data we get on you with our 816 partners and give them full permission to do with it whatever the hell they want, including resell it to their thousands of partners. For your convenience, we have installed state of the art surveillance technology in your home so we can watch you eat, sleep, take a shower as well as record every other event of interest. For your safety, our associates undertake regular visits to your registered address to open and thoroughly check all your mail before it reaches you and share every bit of info found it in with all of our partners. We value your privacy.
- xyst 3y agoOh wow, free security and surveillance! Sign me up!!1 \s
- api 3y agoHow else would giphy make money? If its free and has no other visible way to make money you are the product.
- tomrod 3y agoIn a way that doesn't violate privacy and security. If they can't, they shouldn't be in business the same way a cereal company that cuts their product with dirt or sawdust shouldn't be in business. The death of bad businesses is a good thing.
- weego 3y agoThe irony of people down voting the above and then reading this response on a VC run community platform is palpable. What do you think everyone's been doing during the ignore unit price era?
- tomrod 3y agoHN is a maven trap, not a product. It helps YC to market, but is not the product itself.
- BobaFloutist 3y agoI imagine media properties could pay Giphy to promote gifs of their properties. Probably wouldn't be that bad of an advertising strategy for a new release!
- maxcoder4 3y agoBy starting to charge money. Maybe not realistic right now because of the competition, but I'm sure it would look different if privacy abuse was illegal and everyone had to adapt.
- wewxjfq 3y agoWhen I looked at privacy policies, I rarely found the "We value your privacy" line in privacy policies that seem to treat your personal data with care.
- schiffern 3y ago"We value your privacy. Literally. Scarcity makes anything fetch a better price."
- evrenesat 3y agoOr once could say, "Rest assured, as we gradually erode the sanctity of your privacy, the time will come when all interested parties will have sufficiently profiled you. Eventually, you will be distilled into a simple element within a behavioural prediction model. At that point, we will be anticipating your actions even before you are aware of them. Then you won't have to worry about being watched."
- schiffern 3y agoPerfect behavioral prediction wouldn't be enough. They want nothing less than perfect behavioral control (modulo a few 'free choices' they allow). Lest we forget, this is (of course) the ultimate goal of all advertising.
- xattt 3y agoValue is used as a verb in the sense that they are deriving value from the activities you do in the privacy of your home.
- echelon_musk 3y agoExactly this. It's a disingenuous white lie. 'We value [your lack of] privacy.'
- Habgdnv 3y agoIn my personal (empty) blog my privacy statement starts with: "Unlike all others I do not value your privacy." I will just paste the rest of the whole privacy statement here: This website does not collect any personal information about visitors. My server is configured to not keep any logs, except for error logs, which do not include IP addresses. This is the whole content of my privacy page. 25+ pages that other websites use, i managed to shorten to 2 lines.
- amelius 3y agoIt's time we start charging big for this negative externality of modern capitalism. By the way, if our data is worth money then companies using our data without consent are stealing from us in the same sense that piracy or patent infringement is stealing. Big corporations cannot have it both ways.
- smokel 3y ago> if our data is worth money then companies using our data without consent are stealing from us By that reasoning Pepsi is stealing unsatisfied customers from Coca-Cola and should be put in jail. In other words, I don't think this is how capitalism works.
- u32480932048 3y agoSee also: "Every vote for Sprite is just a vote for [Coke|Pepsi]" It's not how any of it works, but it sounds clever to some, I guess.
- anjel 3y agoIf there is valid consideration its not unjust enrichment. And the bar for valid consideration is a low one. Any This for that exchange will satisfy this requirement. "In exchange for providing you this nearly worthless meme graphic someone else made, you give us panoptic access to your private online activities."
- amelius 3y agoThe whole point is that the reasoning is flawed. Big companies are applying their own flawed logic and ignoring the logical consequences of it.
- j45 3y agoNothing is free. The internet always costs someone. If it's free, you're likely the product being sold.
- fbdab103 3y agoEven when I pay, I still get monitored. Supposedly more so as I have identified myself as someone with resources. Are there any services which shut down analytics if I start paying? Cars, TVs, streaming boxes, whatever. Physical devices for which I spend money, but the vendor still thinks they are entitled to know my every move.
- j45 3y agoIt takes a bit more work to find something that is less, or not privacy invading. Consumer products want to keep the consumer consuming. One can start by learning yunohost or sandstorm and self-hosting. Buy a car and put your own smarts in it. Don't connect your TV to the internet and connect your own box to it. You can find streaming box setups that are pretty locked down running a more secured version of android. Unfortunately the "I've got nothing to hide" crowd made it easier for this kind of tracking.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tremon 3y ago"We value your privacy at $0.015 per bit of information"
- cjk2 3y agoWell it's not like they had any other business model is it?
- cj 3y agoWith 3rd party cookies going away, a lot of companies are relying on ipv4 and ipv6 hashes to correlate users across sites with first party cookies. In other words, if Giphy has your email and IP address, they can help companies like LinkedIn and other brokers de-anonymize IP addresses more accurately with higher percent accuracy. ISPs could mitigate this by rotating IPs every week, but of course you typically get 1 IP and it rarely changes.
- _cenw 3y ago> You typically get 1 IP and it rarely changes. At least in Germany this is only somewhat true on fiber. Most cable/DSL has been on dynamic assignment forever, and some are even on CGNAT for IPv4 now. IPs are shitty stable identifiers - and yet, before we got a static IP with our fiber provider, the neighbors YouTube recommendations leaked into our own.
- cj 3y agoI noticed with LinkedIn they send 1 tracking request with a hash of your ipv4, then the request 302’s to a 2nd API that sends the ipv4 hash together with the ipv6 hash (along with your email if the advertiser provides it in the tracking code). My ISP is also dynamic assignment but it never changes, so basically it’s static. It’s definitely not a good stable identifier. But when you combine enough signals like that (plus screen size, geo ip, ISP provider, etc..) you can get pretty close to being just as accurate (or even more accurate) compared to 3rd party cookies. Even if your IP changes once a day, that might be enough to keep your profile connected if you use LinkedIn, Facebook, Giphy, etc on a daily basis. Another benefit of this over 3rd party cookies is easier cross-device tracking. The whole phasing out of 3rd party cookies might be a net negative for privacy because it forces advertisers to send even more data to ad networks in the never ending pursuit of view/click to conversion attribution. Without 3rd party cookies, the best way to track conversions is to give Google/Linkedin/etc your name/email/phone/mailing address so they can try to map your clicks to the conversion indirectly without cookies. No 3rd party cookies = huge catalyst for data broker industry.
- crtasm 3y agoThough not if you use it in Signal: https://signal.org/blog/giphy-experiment/ https://signal.org/blog/giphy-experiment/
- nickburns 3y agowhile commendable on Signal's part, i think the more surefire route is to forego Giphy's service altogether. GIFs truly are fun, especially when you capture that perfect non-written/verbal message—but it's simply not worth it to me and worth too much to Giphy. thanks for sharing this though.
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]
- xyst 3y agoIf the service is free, you are the product. I wonder how many “partners” Google or Microsoft have? Their legalese probably doesn’t say it explicitly and probably use some loop hole through a data broker. Google -> data broker (1) -> 1000 “partners” or affiliates
- p_l 3y agoAFAIK at least in case of Google, they used to closely guard that data, if only for business advantage. As in, you could only benefit from it if you used Google product, you couldn't get brokerage/raw data. No idea about Microsoft, but I don't know if they have their own ad arm like Google.
- drrlvn 3y agoI guess I’m Wikipedia’s product then.
- afavour 3y agoNot quite, Wikipedia is a paid product. If you don’t pay someone else is covering the cost for you.
- oldkinglog 3y agoThis is quite a misleading comment IMO. You don't "pay" donations, you make them. There is no exchange and no debts are settled. And wikipedia isn't a "product" in the usual sense of a commercial product.
- schiffern 3y agouBlock Origin filter: ! Block Giphy, excessive tracking/sharing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39884009 ||giphy.com
- realfeel78 3y agoGiphy is not now Facebook: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/23/facebook-owner-meta-sells-giphy-shutterstock-gif-search https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/23/facebook-...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 082349872349872 3y agoIs anyone keeping a list of websites which are (a) relatively public, and (b) only serve data? (as news.ycombinator.com appears to do) > And if you gaze long into a cyberspace, the cyberspace also gazes into you. —not FWN
- paulcole 3y agoI like using Giphy and my IP address and private data aren’t something I can directly monetize. So I’ll keep using Giphy and Giphy can figure out how to monetize my IP address and private data. No issues here.
- jacekm 3y agoWouldn't one have to agree to the cookies on Giphy site for the data to be shared? There's no such possibility in Slack, so I'd assume different T&C apply here.
- superkuh 3y agoWow. Giphy must have drastically changed since my last interactions with the dev team ~2016. Back then they actually went out of their way to respond to (and fix!) my bug reports for obscure Firefox forks. I was really impressed with them. The natural lifecycle of free image hosts is well known and short though. Enshittification is inevitable.
- lloydatkinson 3y agoI occasionally post a meme GIF in my posts, and I had been downloading the ones I wanted from Giphy and Tenor and hosting the file on my site… definitely glad I did that instead of unknowingly generating profit for a company simply by having visitors on my site.
- edmundsauto 3y agoSecond order effect of forcing a sale by Meta. At least they would have kept the data from getting shared with 800+ data brokers with who knows what kind of security and decency practices.
- explain 3y agoThey serve programmatic ads like anyone else. That's all this means.
- ColoursofOSINT 3y agoGiphy also does not have a privacy policy for their Firefox extension, but run an analytics script, which I wrote about and sent them an email to which they ignored me despite sending conformation of receiving it. No way to know the data being collected, or opt out. https://www.coloursofosint.com/posts/Investigating-Firefox-Part-1/ https://www.coloursofosint.com/posts/Investigating-Firefox-P...
- vachina 3y agoHow else are they gonna stay afloat? Giphy is nothing but a glorified .gif file host, nobody is going to pay for this service.
- crimsontech 3y agoIsn’t it used in MS Teams, Slack and other messaging and chat apps? I expected they had some kind of API and deal with these companies.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- georgeplusplus 3y agoHow is it that no one has come up with a way to easily inform the user/customer what is being collected and for what? My initial thought would be something along the lines of providing like an ingredients label for food but for data collected from web pages. That would help inform the user what exactly and how pervasive the data they are collecting rather than bucketing it under a common term such as the “data” application services should provide User accounts with exactly what about them was collected and stored in an account summary and ideally if they sold it how much they made off of it as well
- lazide 3y agoWhy would they want to do this? Transparency is not in their favor.
- stemlord 3y agoThis should come as a surprise to no one. Any platform returning a whole webpage with a prominent "download our app" button when you try loading a direct link to a .gif is clearly up to some major bs.