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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

A reminder: everything sent via Discord, including DMs, is being logged in plaintext by Discord and will be available to them and whoever buys them (it was looking to be Microsoft for a while, though now it looks like they will IPO).

Simply having an account there normalizes having personal conversations that can be easily data mined for AI, or otherwise used by Discord or their database/systems administrators. Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA702) allows the federal police to access all of same without a warrant.

The crypto frontrunning possibilities alone must be worth dozens of millions per day.

Friends don't encourage friends to use non-e2ee chat systems. Don't be the honey in the trap.

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Reminder: everything sent on a forum, including DMs, is being logged in plaintext and will be available to the administrator

Unless you're using one of the few services implementing a true zero-trust model where the user manages their own keys, then obviously this is true. They are storing your messages, yes... so that you can access them

I realise there are services like Matrix which do pull off E2E group messaging in a relatively friendly way, but they are the exception. It's unfair to accuse Discord of unique alleged malice for behaving the same as 95% of electronic communication platforms ever

1. you're making a "broken window syndrome" argument ("nobody fixed it in another case, so it must be okay, thus this case is okay")

2. nobody claimed malice on discord's part. instead he's saying that even if you trust Discord not to mine your data, do you trust whomever buys them?

> Simply having an account there normalizes

It's long been normalized, Discord has already won. I'm not saying that it's great, but for certain communities you don't have a choice, besides not participating.

It's actually even worse than back then, when it was "everyone has WhatsApp" because you could easily contact the people otherwise, you already had their number. But imho personal conversations are not the draw for Discord, it's communities with semi-public spaces (public as in 100 people will read it, not "it's available to everyone").

Everyone having WhatsApp turned out to not be so bad. It has end-to-end encryption just like signal. Proven in courts.

I still know a ton of people who would've completely sworn off Facebook and Instagram, and only stayed because of WhatsApp.

There’s issue with metadata & the requirement of sharing one’s address book to use WhatsApp. I wouldn’t be surprised if it too like Signal required users have a Android/iOS primary device & a phone number or you can’t use the service which has privacy implications but also feeds the mobile OS duopoly as you can’t choose another OS (or to just not have a phone).

It does require a phone number. Alternative clients are banned by terms of service which means you can only choose the platforms they support which means iOS or Android.

You can use WhatsApp without sharing the address book by using wa.me links instead (e. g. wa.me/+12345556789) to start chats. Still sucks though.

Sounds like a nice idea for an app that just gets your contacts and makes the links nicely, like a whatsapp wrapper lmao

It was already normal back in the day of IRC and webmasters

Fortunately, Discord has traceless deletion of messages. Once you delete a message, it is no longer stored at their databases.

Is this really the case? I'm skeptical because I kept a conversation with someone who deleted their whole account. The messages are still there on my end which means Discord still has them.

User account deletion sadly does not imply deletion of said user's previous messages. They are instead coalesced to a unified ghost user. Messages have to be deleted manually.

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