Is anyone else pretty bothered that popular services like Discord can and do read all of your 'private' messages in plaintext, and when/if they are bought out, all of your chat and usage history will be sold to an unknown third party along with the company?
I wish at some point we'd see mainstream messengers that put actual effort into respecting the user, along with their autonomy and privacy. It'd be amazing if we could actually directly (from a technical perspective) message other people, without needing central servers between us.
Not only that: if you send links to people in DM, their surveillance ability gives them a shoot-first-ask-questions-later option to counteract spam (or any false positives they mistakenly deem spam).
They suspended my account for linking three people I know personally to my own website. In DM. Not twenty, not some spam site, not strangers. They nuked my whole account with no recourse.
The ToS, of course, says you can't sue them, either in a class action or outside of one. Their ToS also bans political cartoons that "mock" anyone, again, even in DMs.
It's not possible to use Discord without agreeing to these terms.
Wait wait wait, what? You got banned for sharing a link in DMs? Are you certain none of the people you DM'd it to reported it? And it wasn't something blatantly malicious like a malware EXE?
If so, that would be a massive story that would get thousand of upvotes in the subreddit very quickly. That makes me think there might be something more to this.
My account was less than a day old, and both the initial registration, as well as the connection at the time of suspension were via Tor, which may account for the fact that it was incorrectly identified as spam.
Censorship is censorship, though; connecting via a privacy network should not suddenly mean you can't link your friends to your own website without getting summarily deleted.
It's not really a massive story; people simply don't give a shit that Discord is a surveillance/censorship platform.
I think amongst younger people there is a general sense of "they can read all of it on every platform, who cares anymore" fatalism, and anyone who refuses to participate on that basis or complains about it is seen as an inconvenient whiner who should just click AGREE on the ToS without reading it like everyone else did, and leak their physical location/residential address to Discord via their home IP or phone number, like everyone else did.
Unfortunately, I (and others like me) do not have that luxury. For physical safety reasons, if I cannot participate without leaking my location, I cannot participate at all.
>It'd be amazing if we could actually directly (from a technical perspective) message other people, without needing central servers between us.
How could you do this while also preserving network privacy between users? One of the big selling points of Discord is users can't see each other's IP addresses when they message or call each other. I believe you would need at least a simple relay in the middle to prevent that. Or layer it on some Tor-like anonymizing network, but I think that wouldn't be practical for this use case (especially video calls).
This is especially important for not just the typical privacy reasons: Discord is marketed heavily towards gamers, and some gaming communities are filled with script kiddies who rent "booter" (DDoS-for-hire) services to knock opponents online, to torment them and/or to gain an upper hand in games where disconnection means automatic forfeiture. This was one reason a lot of people switched from Skype to Discord, because Skype had many ways of seeing other users' IP addresses.
Yep, and of course it's all linked to your real life identity because they basically require a phone number to use their service. This was true too of, say, WhatsApp before it enabled encryption, but with Discord it's even more insidious because most users think they are using an online pseudonym to communicate, unconnected to their real identity.
From what I've gathered there is some sort of reputation system in place, such that most users creating accounts from reputable residential ISP IP addresses aren't asked for a phone number, but those creating accounts from Tor/VPNs/datacenters/etc often are.
Yes, but I am guessing also if your IP has been used for other accounts and certainly if you use multiple residential accounts from different places (I had my account disabled while travelling). It's pretty sensitive.
Why a political problem? What I see is that in general people don't care enough. It's not that they don't care about privacy, they just don't care enough to change platform over it.
In my view, people caring is part of politics. The word politics, as I use it, is acquisition, organization and exertion of power. That's directly connected to what peoples' perceptions and incentives are.
I'm not here to debate you on anecdotal data (I know 5 people off the top of my head who do use it).
It has a respectable 10,000,000+ installs on the google play store and ranks high on the apple store with 270,000+ reviews. Though not comparable with the likes of WhatsApp (which I personally use and prefer), I would not dismiss it as 'not' a mainstream option. We can agree to disagree for sure.
Nato has traditionally been an xmpp user. Now there are discussions about a successor. Matrix is being rolled out inside the french state (including the military) and there have been proposals to switch nato to it. I consider nato as well as french state employees to be "masses" of people.
The probability that somebody replies with a quote of the entire unencrypted thread when attempting to use PGP approaches 1 for long email chains. Encrypted email also leaks not just metadata but data since you can't encrypt subject headers.
I agree, it's not the most user-friendly of business models. Do you know how to make a more user-friendly business model profitable enough to appeal to investors?
This is not a rhetorical question. If I knew a way to make a more user-friendly service profitable enough to have a reasonable shot of gigadollar return on investment (which is what it takes to be interesting to venture capitalists), I might very well go ahead and put together a YC application, but right now, I don't know a way to do that. Do you?
I would prefer not having to use VC money to fund such an endeavour. This model needs to stop, maybe a change to a bootstrapped model + pay to use is the way to go.
I think that was responding to the call for "mainstream messengers that put actual effort into respecting the user, along with their autonomy and privacy." iMessage is closed-source and centralized, but from what I know of it, it does seem fair to say it doesn't violate people's autonomy or privacy in a significant way.
I wish at some point we'd see mainstream messengers that put actual effort into respecting the user, along with their autonomy and privacy. It'd be amazing if we could actually directly (from a technical perspective) message other people, without needing central servers between us.