Zoom is one of those few apps that have seen tremendous growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, their growth has been marred by privacy issues and they are trying to repair their image after their explosive growth.
Recently, Zoom announced some product updates and the most interesting one is that they will temporarily remove GIPHY integration in Zoom Chat. “To ensure strong privacy protection for users, we’ve temporarily removed the GIPHY integration in Zoom Chat,’ Zoom said in the blog post. “Once additional technical and security measures have been deployed, we will re-enable the feature.”
This is interesting because GIPHY was recently acquired by Facebook for $400 million. The very fact they decided to temporarily remove GIPHY integration in Zoom Chat means that they are trying to distance themselves from Facebook.
Zoom is distancing itself from Facebook thanks to a popular expose by Motherboard in March. They found that the iOS app was sending data to Facebook. which is a massive privacy issue. The app was sending data to Facebook like their device details, timezone, when they open the app and so on. Motherboard even found out that Zoom had not made the data transfer to Facebook clear on their privacy policy.
Zoom swiftly removed the code that sent data to Facebook and it seems they are now wary of Facebook’s assets that damaged their brand. They will probably check out if the GIPHY integration might send additional information to Facebook, which if found out might be another PR crisis for the company that has grown over 30 times in the first quarter of the year.
