Discord says piracy subpoena would violate users’ First Amendment rights
theverge.com
Discord defends itself against efforts to stop piracy on its platform by saying no to more invasive data collection. Even though Discord isn’t exactly known for privacy, this is a great move for its users. What are your thoughts?
If they did not collect any information, they would not have any information to give when they are served a subpoena.
How else would they store and sync the information?
Encrypt it end to end with them not having the keys
They do have to retrieve old messages when new users join though. I’m sure the government can force them to lett them in a server and unlock the roles
Why?
Why is channel history needed for new users?
Back in the IRC days you joined a channel that was just empty, if you wanted the history you had to run an IRC client continously, I remember running screen irssi on a separate computer and sshing into the server, reconnecting the screen with irssi in it.
If you want the history automatically, you can't expect privacy.
90% of the reason I even have discord is because people much smarter than me use it to share information. Nobody uses other areas suited for sharing information anymore. It's either Reddit or discord.
Because a lot of people go to discord servers to access existing information?
That is a good point, I have never done that, and to me it is just a chat system....
Far more than should tbh. Too many little game mods will have a Discord for questions and reporting issues rather than using their GitHub or a forum.
Oh I agree, it's very much a "forcing a round peg into a square hole" situation, but I doubt discord will make any changes to push back against it
Why would they care what you use it for as long as you use them and give them money
Because now you're using discord for more things? You're giving them more data? What's not to like
Doubt that they are scrapping the data themselves at this point in time. They care more about the user count as their major revenue seems focused on selling nitro and whatever shit they are putting up in their shop. Not in anyway saying that it is secure obviously and they might choose to sell data like reddit but gotta sick with the more plausible scenarios.
Well who knows, they do offer AI summaries now so they're at least using the data for something,who says they won't use it for other things in the future
Oh I don't think it's a problem for Discord, but when it comes to software projects specifically I find the reliance on Discord frustrating because of its non-public orientation. If I'm having an issue I'd far rather search for a solution on a public wiki, bug report system, or forum than sign up for one more Discord server.
At the same time, expecting privacy in a room where a bunch of strangers hang out is already unreasonable. If everyone already in the channel can log the chats, for example by idling in the channel, then adding E2E on top of that is probably a false sense of security.
I still do that today.
That's not true, you can pull the history from other users who happen to be online.
The feds can also pull such history when they join the server
Sure, and the users of the channel could decide whether to share that history with new users or not. My point is that if you don't have messages on the server, the service can't help here, and it's up to the users of the channel to set their own policies. If the data is stored on the server, the service could be legally obligated to provide that data.
I have an issue with something I'm using and there is a discord server I will join it. I then search my issue and its usually been adressed in the past. Without history I would be forced to ask the question that has probably been answered many times in the past.
I had no idea you could do that, sweet!
Keep the data but encrypted. Let users send links that contain the pki info to decrypt the messages. Have that pki info generated client side.
Discord would only need to shuffle data, provide authentication, and provide the web app data down to the client. But every bit of user shared and generated content would be encrypted to them.
Like I said, Discord can still be compelled to let feds join the server, thus receiving the PKIs.
If the the pki is generated by users client side by a secret discord doesn't control it wouldn't be an issue.
Either you share the message history to new users (which includes feds) or you don't have any history. I don't understand what you mean
The server provides the data to authenticated users and helps facilitate pki between the clients.
If someone is added by the server to have access to the data but wasn't given a key capable of decryption by an actual user they wouldn't have actual access, just encrypted data.
Sync from another online user. If each message is signed by the author, there's a built-in protection against tampering.
It's really not hard, they just have to care enough to build it that way.
Can't feds also sync them from other users?
Sure, if they're granted access to the channel. But that access would come from users of the channel, not the service itself, and if the service doesn't store the keys (i.e. you need at least one user online to get access), the service can't really help the feds.
And whether to provide access to history for new users can absolutely be a setting on the channel. I'm just saying that having the messages only on the clients doesn't preclude sharing those messages with a newcomer.
Collecting information, on the context of third parties. Obviously they have information, otherwise the whole system wouldn't work.
Discord sucks and nobody should use it.
The only thing that really sucks about it is that knowledge that was openly searchable is now locked away behind logins.
no, you're also effectively locked out of any participation unless you provide an email address and phone number, which they won't even tell you about in advance but use dark patterns and gaslighting that they noticed "suspicious activity" to step by step first ask you for an email and then once that is validated they prompt you for a phone number. the only thing they don't do yet is ask for ID.
Validation level is set by server owners, you are unlikely to need to verify a phone number except in the biggest (and therefore spammiest) servers
it doesn't seem to be server specific because once prompted there is no way to use the account again, even if you decided to just not use a server that may have these settings set.
Odd, I've never had that experience. Maybe you're using a VPN or something that makes your IP look more suspicious.
Yeah, I've never needed to add a phone number.
I keep trying to take out my phone number because I don't want strangers seeing that shit, but... then "suspicious activity" gets detyected seconds later...
While this is true, Discord has a massive user base, so it’s somewhat a privacy win for the common person
its still the old chicken&egg problem: if you dont have communities you dont have users, and if you dont have users you dont have communities
thats why everyone sticks to discord
Well, you are on Lemmy aren't you
And he's the only one.
We are all Estebiu alts.
Well yeah, cuz there are quite a lot of communities and users already
Social inertia and an extra helping of users hate having to learn things.
Matrix is promising, but I think it still could use a bit more polish. That said, I run a discord community, and soon one of these days I'm going to make a Matrix version of it and encourage users to try it out. Though very few probably will.
I say we return to IRC
Discord is a fantastic IRC replacement.
The issue is that people try to use it to replace forums, wikis, personal websites, issue trackers, git, and the kitchen sink, and it does none of these.
Exactly. It's like IRC w/ audio (and probably video now?) chat, and you can post gifs and whatnot. It should be used for discussion, and it's perfectly okay for that. I would prefer something a bit more privacy focused (again, IRC is decent here, just needs some cryptography), but it's okay.
But yeah, not a fan of it being a resource for anything beyond meeting like-minded people to have discussions with.
What's a good alternative that allows easy instant message, voice and video calls, and makes it easy to group my friends by game?
I have been using revolt, going to setup my own server once I get better lol, last 3 times have been a cluster fuck to get it working. I got mattermost working the first try but it's a slack replacement not discord.
I get that they have different target user base, but honestly, what’s the difference?
Roles and permissions. Slack and mattermost is just allowed and disallowed to each channel.
Steam group chat? It's structured in the same way.
You can create channels for people to join with Steam?
Yeah, if you open the friends window on the bottom it should have a group chats bar with a button to create a server and then it works like discord where you can add additional text and voice channels
Steam has voice channels? 🤯
Idk if its changed, but you cant edit or delete messaged un steam. That was a huge turn off for me
Matrix?
I only put ? Because I don't know what you mean of grouping your friends by game.
Like a server/channel where everyone in it is both your friend and a player of that game or a contact group that manage so you can see who is that.
There really isn't one, that's why Discord is so widely used.
Your phone.
Not really no. SMS is nowhere near as versatile as a service like Discord in terms of being able to meet new people or have conversations that don't overload unrelated but potentially interested people with notifications.
Discord is on my phone 😭
There is no alternative that can do the same
Good.
Discord sucks at such a fundamental level that the lack of any competing apps for this particularly awful niche actually restores some of my faith in humanity.
Okay you're just trolling.
Have you seen Discord's UI?
This is my genuine opinion and I don't appreciate the condescension.
You don't have to like it, but trying to dismiss it as mere trolling is, at best, intellectually dishonest.
pretty certain their just confused why someone would say there's not a niche for a chat client. chat clients always have, and always will exist.
There are lots of chat clients.
Fortunately, only Discord is also trying to be a for-profit walled garden, a support forum, an in-game voice chat app, a community hub, a media channel, a political soapbox, a video game store, a livestreaming service, a bot playground, and now, apparently, a pirate fileshare.
Life has gotten better since I dropped it. Moved a dozen or so people over to Signal and have been running with that ever since.
I do miss the ability to easily stream games, though.
They will give you up in a heartbeat as long as they don't have to do the extra work of finding you.
Discord isn't protecting anyone's privacy just their bottom dollar
Discord still sells your information for advertising so it's meaningless posturing.
I'm gonna get flak for this but no, Discord does not sell any user data, no matter how many times people keep repeating it. Quoting a legendary redditor here:
Discord's privacy policy repeatedly states that they do not sell your personal information:
This is a legal document that they will get in trouble for if they were lying. They've already been fined hundreds of thousands of euros for GDPR violations but that curiously did not include a fine for "took people's personal information and then sold them without consent whilst explicitly saying they didn't do that"
Discord further has no third party advertisements which they can use to "sell" your data by allowing those advertisements to target you.
Real question. When they say "we don't sell your data", that also means they are saying "we don't trade your information with other companies for other things that aren't money", or it doesn't?
Makes sense. I've been getting "quests" and adverts about games I don't even own. If Discord was selling data for targeted advertising, the adverts would've been far more... Targeted.
Still annoying as hell, though, but at least it's limited to my mobile app. I use Vesktop on my computer.
Not meaningless but certainly undercuts the grandstanding.
Yes, the authorities will have to pay for data like everyone else.
And that's job creation right there!
Thanks to Discord, I'm able to keep merchants that "connect overbearing authoritarian entities with the data they shouldn't have, at a price point we all can agree on" at stable, sub-full time employment status.
Truly, pillar of the economy, er community.
Of course it's Nexon.
I had a server with a respectable size.
Did a hard cutoff due to some stupid discord thing.
I managed to get a total of 50 people of about 3k to switch and out of those like 7 actually stayed.
Yet I had to get a burner account again to get in touch with certain people.
Its all be man.
Switch to what?
for the 7 that actually stuck, it was matrix for a while
I've never played a Nexus game, and I'm definitely not going to start now. People who are pirating a game aren't usually doing it bcz they hate the company, or have a vendetta of any kind. It's usually a money issue. People are more than happy to pay for games when they have money, and you're not a shit company.
No, it's a convenience/service issue. Last time i've seen a third-party launcher was Mirrors Edge on Steam proton, and that thing failed to run since it wanted to open more than my security limit of 50k files, which no game hit before.
Well, I have no First Amendment rights, so there's that.
I'm not exactly clear on the legal structure for digital platforms, but if you're physically in the US, you have first amendment protections, regardless of citizenship or residency status. So as long as your group has some US persons in it, you should benefit from their first amendment protections. That said, the first amendment (and fourth, which is about unlawful searches) only applies to governments, so the service you use needs to refuse to hand over data for it to matter at all.
It's kind of like people in the US (e.g. me) benefiting from European GDPR protections. Some sites I use now have the option of demanding my deata be deleted, and many sites have cookie preferences, none of which are required in my area.
That said, I definitely trust technological measures more than legal ones. So I don't use Discord, because I don't trust their technological protections. Ideally, Discord wouldn't have any data to give up, and therefore there wouldn't be a choice here, they would have no data to give up.
Sad am forced on this app, I love matrix more.
That's exactly what I'd say if I wanted to catch the bigger fishes.
I know the feeling. Similar thing happened in a discord I'm in. Rate limit ban on a leader account, no response from support even via burner, then jumped ship to a new one that could actually be managed.
At least discord has to foot the storage costs of a dead server pestered with bots because of their own incompetence.