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Comment by devwastaken | Hacker News Reader

As much as I want something like discord to succeed, it throws all cautions to the wind with user data. There is rentention in two databases of every chat message sent. If somebody ever gets access they could crawl all their info and learn most of their private life through it.

Steam on the other hand will not retain more than 5ish of the last messages.

I'd say it's fine aslong as users could set a duration for their messages automatically, but Discord doesn't even have a mass deletion option. Their API has been Incapable of mass deletion further than 2 weeks.

I have no doubt there will be some major leaks in the future that ruin someone's life.

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Steam holds messages for the past two weeks, you can see these messages I the support tools. GDPR complaincy

FYI - their support tools are almost entirely disconnected from Steam itself.

Source - know owner of said support tool software.

There is no way to massively delete your past messages. In addition to that:

1. If you close a private message window and are not friends with the person or share a server with them, there is no way to open it again, so you've lost access to that chat history and can't delete your messages from there.

2. If you get banned from a server, you lose access to that server's history and can't delete your messages from it.

3. If you delete your account, your messages are not deleted and stay in all private conversations and servers forever.

Their data management is simply terrible. Personally, I would've deleted my account already, but I don't feel comfortable knowing I can't delete my past messages and that they may add that option later.

How does allowing you to delete your messages jive with the UX of other users?

If every user you sent a message to had a copy of your message would you expect those to be deleted as well? Isn't that the recipient's data?

Assuming you answered no is there a material difference when you store a single copy and do reference counting?

Discord's UI might be lacking but allowing you to delete messages authored by you but ownwed by another is already pretty privacy oriented.

I'm a bit confused about 1. First, you can't private message someone if you're not friends and/or don't share a server. Second, all DMs are placed under the DM menu and are visible until you delete them.

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