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A comment on Why I won't recommend Signal anymore. Parent comment

Re:Why I won't recommend Signal anymore by sandervenema on Saturday November 05, 2016 @03:15PM (#12881372)
Hi there! The Giphy thing is what set me off writing the blog post in the first place. Maybe I should've expanded a bit more on that in the article. As far as I can tell, the idea is that requests to the Giphy API gets proxied through Signal.

I don't see anything in moxie's blog post about whether this is optional. If it isn't and it's sending everything you type to the Giphy API then we have a whole new problem.

In the blogpost by moxie, there's the example of typing "Im excited", which then gets sent in multiple API requests to giphy (basically one of 'I', one of 'Im', one for 'Im+' etc.). Now, if this is an action you don't do explicitly (like pressing a button or something, to search for gifs), then it would basically send everything you type in order to continually search for gifs and then offer suggestions? It's not clear from the blogpost. I hope at least that this is not what moxie had in mind.

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Re:Why I won't recommend Signal anymore by giancarlostoro on Saturday November 05, 2016 @03:57PM (#12881572)
Giphy only occurs when you click on a button to add an attachment, and you have to click on Giphy, THEN you search for GIFs.
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Re:Why I won't recommend Signal anymore by haffenloher on Saturday November 05, 2016 @09:30PM (#12882940)
I promise that nobody is going to force you to use the GIF search. For a demo on how this feature works, check out the short video embedded into the blog post. [1]

I second the parent poster's question: "why is this dangerous?"

[1] https://whispersystems.org/blog/images/giphy.webm

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Re:Why I won't recommend Signal anymore by sctblol on Saturday November 05, 2016 @03:30PM (#12881455)
It's not clear to me, but I assumed that that only happened if you tapped on a "search for gifs" button, which is something that can happen accidentally, but... that's unlikely.
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