Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

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> it is actually the spiritual successor to IRC, AIM, and similar chat services, where the data is typically ephemeral

I can't speak for AIM, but I've never assumed IRC was ephemeral. Most IRC servers had and have numerous people idling in the channel with their client just archiving everything that happened. Many of those archives ended up published on the internet and that usually surprised no one.

Discord is even worse because it does the archiving for you and grants new users immediate access to the entire archive.

As a rule, each and every recipient of every message that you send has the option to archive or forward that message. That's a simple fact of information flow that everyone in the modern world must wrap their heads around. In this case, when you send a message to Discord you're transitively sending it to everyone who is currently or ever will be on a given server. That has always been true, and that fact has been exploited ever since Discord came about.

All these researchers have done is expose the kind of archiving was always possible and always happening.

Sure, but there's a massive difference between an actor joining a chat and maintaining indefinitely, constant access to it vs an actor joining a chat and having access to the full history automatically.

> All these researchers have done is expose the kind of archiving was always possible and always happening.

What they've done is brought forward another instance of "this is why we can't have nice things". A useful feature being used in unintended ways without regard for ethics and privacy. The authors of this paper did not have respect for people's data and privacy. They did the bare minimum to make the claim they took privacy measures, regardless of whether the claim is true or not. I guess that's enough for them.

You're not getting it: this is already happening everywhere. There is no private data on public Discord servers. Never has been.

All these researchers have done is admit to doing what many less well-meaning people and organizations are already doing on a regular basis. If that admission leads to more people realizing that public Discord servers are public, then the researchers have done everyone a service.

Blaming the researchers in this case is like blaming LockPickingLawyer for locks being pickable. The bad guys were already picking the locks before he started his channel, all he did was shine a light on just how bad most locks are.

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