Hacker News Reader

Comment by snowgrove | Hacker News Reader

I stopped using Signal, along with my adult tech-oriented friends, when we all had bad experiences migrating our accounts to new phones. That plus the phone number requirement, intrusive contacts integration, and the weird crypto side projects killed my interest in Signal entirely. My friends and I use Discord now.

View on HN

Discord is not end to end encrypted, and Discord, along with whoever buys them, will receive the complete plaintext message history of all of your conversations with those friends.

So some algorithm somewhere will eventually try to parse five years of shitposts and memes between me and my friends and try to figure out what it can advertise to me based on it, I can't say I'm even mad

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

Ah, the old 'I don't need privacy because I have nothing to hide' fallacy.

I have nothing to hide because I recognize the intentions and limitations of different platforms. Discord is a gaming chat platform and I post and act accordingly there. I don't understand why I should be entitled to privacy on a free chat platform hosted with someone else's money.

This is fine. But you are talking about Discord as a replacement for Signal, in a thread about Signal and it's privacy model.

But for a lot of purposes, encryption really isn't that important. Most friend groups isn't a group of journalists and their sources discussing state secrets. The privacy from end-to-end encryption is a nice-to-have, but I'm not even sure if it's worth the inherent inconvenience for most friend groups.

How do friend groups deal with members who might want to drop a potentially controversial in future viewpoint, let alone a politically charged opinion?

Any use of a non-e2e service as a replacement for an e2e service basically means either self-censorship or recklessness. The data is not going away, and if context changes can implicate everyone involved.

Yup, and I don’t care. If I ever organize a protest I’ll do it on Signal, or another end-to-end encrypted platform. For daily banter I’ll use whatever a majority of my friends prefer. That’s currently Discord for the above-mentioned reasons.

You know that. It's unlikely that all of the rest of the people who join Discord because "all of their friends are on it" that your presence there influenced know that, and in many possible future scenarios, you and others' presence there directly contributes to the harm that may befall them as a result of their loss of privacy thereby.

https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/cardinal_richelieu_183310

It's also impossible to effectively self-censor in the present for potential content-based threats in the future.

Discord also bans certain entire domains from being sent as links in DM, as an antispam measure, and requires in their ToS that people give up their civil rights to join. It's not polite to ask friends to submit to third-party censorship of private conversations just to talk to you.

It’s not polite to assume ignorance of all this on the part of my friends, either, but here you are.

If Signal didn’t suck as much, my friends wouldn’t have left and I wouldn’t have followed them. It’s really that simple.

Not only that, all attachments are publicly accessible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com