Technology @lemmy.world Gemini24601 @lemmy.world 1mo ago

Discord says piracy subpoena would violate users’ First Amendment rights

www.theverge.com Discord says piracy subpoena would violate users’ First Amendment rights

Discord says it shouldn’t have to comply with the order.

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?

94 comments

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
  
  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.
- 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.
- 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
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  Steam group chat? It's structured in the same way.
  
  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.
- 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.
- 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.
The attorney called Nexon’s demands “improper and overly burdensome”

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 is committed to fulfilling its obligations under the law
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:
  
  We don’t sell your personal information. Our business is based on subscriptions and paid products, not from selling your personal information to third parties.
  
  We make money from paid subscriptions and the sale of digital (and sometimes physical) goods, not from selling your personal information to third parties.
  
  We do not sell the personal data of our users or share personal data for targeted advertising purposes.
  
  ‍No sale or “share” of personal information: The CCPA sets forth certain obligations for businesses that sell or “share” personal information. We do not sell or share the personal information of our users as defined in the CCPA.
  
  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.
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.
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.
That's exactly what I'd say if I wanted to catch the bigger fishes.

94 comments