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Comment by sebstefan | Hacker News Reader

Discord is an app that's so routinely reverse-engineered there are projects with a million+ users designed around patching changes to it, straight in the binary.

https://betterdiscord.app/

Do you think their big evil plan is to make up a lie that will last maybe 3 weeks, jeopardize the user trust and lose nitro revenue

Surely there is so much money to be made selling random people's faces.

If they tell you they're not selling your data they're not selling your data. What you should worry about is incompetence

Not even 6 months ago a third party they used for ID verification got breached

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo

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> Do you think their big evil plan is to make up a lie that will last maybe 3 weeks, jeopardize the user trust and lose nitro revenue

???? Yes? Companies nuke their core product all the time for the sake of a big IPO number.

Of course discord has no track record of overextending their privacy policy and selling data you would not expect (sarcasm).

For example but not limited to "programs you run and other system specific information". I believe I read a while back they recorded titles of all opened windows but I can't seem to find a reference for that.

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/rsxeee/you_should_...

I'm not saying they won't ever start collecting it and selling it. I'm saying the day they do, it will be laid out in their privacy policy. Right now they're making statements that they're not even collecting it.

Surely there is so much money to be made selling random people's faces.

I really hope I misread sarcasm in that statement. Because of course there is a lot of money in that

How much? 2 bucks per user?

Their paid users shell out 3 a month...

And then you think of the real world

> secretly selling your IDs data behind your back, they have to account for that revenue in their books, put it in their privacy policies or do it illegally, it's weak to whistleblowers, third parties get breached all the time (as well as yourself), and you have to trust the people you're selling this to. It's not credible.

How many users are paying? a few million? How many use the service for "free"? A few hundred million? Are you stupid?

>How many users are paying?

7.3 million paying every month

>How many use the service for "free"?

143 million times maybe 2 bucks once. Most likely five cents once.

>Are you stupid?

Flagged

While what GP said was not worded how the site rules say it should be, your original point is very tedious and can only be read charitably if we assume you never read any news or barely retain anything. We are currently on a news website. I think if you want non-commenting readers to see your point and have charitable thoughts of you it would help to explain why you're ignoring reality for whatever it is you are positing (consumer protections because of subscriptions? really? for this corporation?).

What you're saying in this post essentially just underlines GPs point, which I imagine isn't what you're trying to communicate. You have to help a reader understand your point of view, especially if it's far removed from objective reality (which is that a corporate entity will betray you for money, regardless of whether that makes sense long-term).

Nope, when corporate overlords sell your data they say it in their terms of use and privacy policies because no one is that stupid. If Discord says they're not selling that data, they're not selling that data. The day they'll start doing it, they'll put it in their policy.

You're making up a reality that doesn't exist in your head and claiming it's the truth.

You have in your head examples like facebook or spotify. Spoiler: They tell you exactly with what sauce you're gonna be eaten

Discord had a scandal not too long ago where pictures of people/passports were stolen. There they said that they delete those files immediately after processing them. This proves your statement as false.

You got that fact from my own comment a few ones above this

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo

It was a 3rd party

Are you saying that corporations respect the letter of the law when it comes to privacy? They don't, they can just drop some lunch money when caught red-handed [0]

Even when they write in their privacy policy that they collect private data and sell them to third parties, unlawfully, that does not make it any better. Cambridge Analytica was operating with respect to Facebook policies. Would you say that people that took an IQ test and were manipulated into voting pro-Brexit were well-aware of the sauce they were eaten with?

Discord is unfortunately no different, they're profit-driven and likely to sell user data already or in the future, because it's incredibly easy and profitable to do so. Why would a chat app try and predict its users' gender? [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDPR_fines_and_notices [1] https://x.com/DiscordPreviews/status/1790065494432608432

Vencord is more patching Discord: https://github.com/Vendicated/Vencord

BetterDiscord is more... client modding to enable userscripts. Vencord is actually running find-and-replace on Discord's Webpack modules to implement deeper integrations. They're far more reverse-engineering than BetterDiscord's monkey-patching.

I think selling it to state actors lined could definitely be a big boon. I'll never trust them, I'd rather delete my account

Do you think they reverse engineer the server side?

Oh hey Direwolf I've contributed some stuff to your mods.

You mean if they lied about just the IDs but not the faces? The paragraph quoted mentions that the verification is done client side, "never leaves your device".

If we admit that they're saying they won't store it, then secretly selling your IDs data behind your back, they have to account for that revenue in their books, put it in their privacy policies or do it illegally, it's weak to whistleblowers, third parties get breached all the time (as well as yourself), and you have to trust the people you're selling this to. It's not credible.

There's similar debates with Whatsapp and their E2E encryption. Read this

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/02/02/whatsapp...

Right, because that never happened to discord or any other multibillion VC fueled company that offers its services for free. See also meta repeatedly lying about absolutely anything that has to do with privacy.

> If they tell you they're not selling your data they're not selling your data.

Oh you naive child. /s

If they tell you they are not selling your data, its because they have a license agreement with another company which is selling your data. 'They' very specifically arent selling it, however they are very much profitting from other companies using it.

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