Is Discord spying on you?

General
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What’s been happening.

Recently, Discord has made a change to their privacy policy and this has sparked massive outrage and drama within the Discord Community.

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This all kicked off when a reddit thread started talking about some changes in the Discord Privacy Policy. And highlighted the fact that they have removed a certain part of their ToS and added something else.

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Many now have came up with many theories and many people overreacting, today we’ll be debunking those statements and coming up with the main reason for this change.

Debunking

Some people have came up with some serious claims, however, many of them are not true.

Discord now collected streaming content to train their AI.

If you’ve been living under a rock :rock: for the past 6 months you may have noticed a massive inclination in AI and many companies are now looking to integrate this into their platforms.

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We know this isn’t true as there haven’t been direct relations to feeding the AI with this data we also have another more likely reason on why this happened. We would also need to know that Discord would have to change their ToS more to state they were sending data to OpenAI.

What’s actually going on?

It’s taking a while for Discord to respond the there only official statement from Discord is on a PcGamer article:

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Discord is adding features that allow users to record and send voice messages and clip live streams, which of course would require a change in the ToS.

This has made people overreact quite a lot. However, the main privacy problem is that Discord has funding from Tencent a massive Chinese company, Tencent & in China there is currently a mas surveillance problem, so that should be the primary risk.

People are suggesting an alternative, Guilded - Which is owned by Roblox, which also has got funding from Tencent, so that idea is almost completely futile.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, people shouldn’t be too frustrated or concerned about this, it’s highly unlikely that Discord will be using your data to train an AI model, it’s likely that the new features simply required a privacy change.

If you would change from discord what would you change to?

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If I was very concerned I could possibly consider hosting https://www.rocket.chat/ myself.

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I don’t use discord since I was hacked and I’m not gonna use it again.

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This is partially concerning, most of this on the financial end … if Discord and Guilded really are recieving funding from Tencent, this problem will only widen. And the same goes for even more usage of AIs.

If this were to happen, I don’t even know where I would go, perhaps Google Chat. It seems foreign interference is just not occuring in politics alone, but businesses as well, and this is what’s concerning and people have a right to be concerned about this, as well as the sharp increases in AI influence.

In other words, this will be a huge betrayal of trust between consumers and producers if such claims are found to be true.