‘Wut?!’ Indeed

Six years ago Slack added built-in Giphy support. So post-acquisition, Facebook will now have tracking info for all the Slack channels where this has been used. That’s cool.

Update: This seems to have gotten some folks’ attention. Via email, I received the following response to my post from Brian Elliott, VP and general manager at Slack, quoted in entirety:

We’re excited for the Giphy team on the news of their acquisition.

Slack users love using Giphy, as well as tools like emoji reactions and apps like Donut and Hallway. They all bring teams closer together, especially when they’re working remotely. Allowing teams to share their personality through GIFs and enable camaraderie at work adds to the social glue teams are looking for when there’s no physical water cooler, and will continue to be an important part of the Slack experience.

As always, Slack is committed to protecting user and company data. Giphy doesn’t receive any information about users or even companies using the Giphy for Slack integration, and only sees Slack usage of the Giphy API in aggregate.

I also heard from a little birdie and trusted source who works at Slack, who told me:

Slack built and still owns the Giphy integration. We call their API, and don’t send them identifying info about channels. (This is pretty much the opposite of how most Slack integrations work, so your initial assumptions were reasonable.)

★ Friday, 15 May 2020