The question can go the other way as well; what proof does people have that Discord is outright lying in their communication? All the communication indicates that they have actually taken steps to minimize the privacy impact. Importantly using local processing and only storing if it’s successful or not, even if that means that it can likely be bypassed (important web dev rule, never trust the client side).
Now introducing the Persona system is very concerning, and also a reason I don’t think it’s an overreaction anymore. Even if they claim they only save the data for longer than 7 days, the connection to Palantir and Peter Thiel is extremely troubling and erodes the trust. I mean it comes down to me not trusting them as much as Discord.
To expand on your question on why they wouldn’t be as evil as possible, it comes down to whether or not you believe that all developers and product managers are evil or not. I have worked for a decade for a few IT heavy companies and yeah, there are shit going on, but it’s mostly due to laziness, or product managers wanting numbers and pretty graphs of user behaviors (when it comes to privacy and data sharing).
The leak of the 70k UK identities is an interesting case. It’s often framed as if the processor was hacked but it was actually the normal support system where they handled appeals. The real mistake was that Discord didn’t properly think through appeal handling and it is probably attributable to a mistake/laziness then intentional malice.
Of course a bit different for the macro social networks, whose primary income stream is selling ads and they want to build behavior profiles because that allows them to argue that advertisers get more value out of their platform. The point I want to make is that your real name and photo doesn’t actually have any value for the companies, because they already do have everything they need from your activity. It does have risks and liabilities though if nothing else due to GDPR.
The question can go the other way as well; what proof does people have that Discord is outright lying in their communication? All the communication indicates that they have actually taken steps to minimize the privacy impact. Importantly using local processing and only storing if it’s successful or not, even if that means that it can likely be bypassed (important web dev rule, never trust the client side).
Now introducing the Persona system is very concerning, and also a reason I don’t think it’s an overreaction anymore. Even if they claim they only save the data for longer than 7 days, the connection to Palantir and Peter Thiel is extremely troubling and erodes the trust. I mean it comes down to me not trusting them as much as Discord.
To expand on your question on why they wouldn’t be as evil as possible, it comes down to whether or not you believe that all developers and product managers are evil or not. I have worked for a decade for a few IT heavy companies and yeah, there are shit going on, but it’s mostly due to laziness, or product managers wanting numbers and pretty graphs of user behaviors (when it comes to privacy and data sharing).
The leak of the 70k UK identities is an interesting case. It’s often framed as if the processor was hacked but it was actually the normal support system where they handled appeals. The real mistake was that Discord didn’t properly think through appeal handling and it is probably attributable to a mistake/laziness then intentional malice.
Of course a bit different for the macro social networks, whose primary income stream is selling ads and they want to build behavior profiles because that allows them to argue that advertisers get more value out of their platform. The point I want to make is that your real name and photo doesn’t actually have any value for the companies, because they already do have everything they need from your activity. It does have risks and liabilities though if nothing else due to GDPR.