Some time ago when Discord used Surveillance Services to face scan all their users a lot of possible alternatives where thrown around.
- It should be already hosted by someone
- have voice chat
- Be easy to sign up to so that i can convince people
Some time ago when Discord used Surveillance Services to face scan all their users a lot of possible alternatives where thrown around.
I’m not the person you asked, but honestly, if Discord wants to monitor me and my homies talking about our nerdy ass video game shit, I don’t mind it at all. It’s not like I’m setting up heroin deals on there (or anywhere else). Like, I give a negative amount of fucks if they know that we’re gonna be hardcore raiding from 8pm to midnight on Tuesday and Thursday, with a training session for new members on Saturday morning from 7am to 10am. I could not care less if they read my chats about dungeon strategies and properly optimized endgame gear. If they want to see who won my weekly raffle for 1000 ingame gold, that’s fine by me.
It’s not even like they can use my data for marketing purposes. I play exactly one video game, and I already plan to buy every expansion the game releases until I either die, or the servers shut down. And we have a very strict “no politics” rule in my server, so it’s not like they’re gonna catch us planning some sort of revolution. We’re just some MMORPG nerds nerding out about our MMORPG.
If they ask me to scan my face, or send them a pic of my ID, that’s where I draw the line. I have never, and will never, put a picture of my face on the internet. I’ve never posted any pics of my kids, or my grandkids either.
But nothing I say on Discord is “private”, there are over 600 people on my server, all playing the same game. We only talk about the game, or occasionally what we had for dinner (but that’s only on Foodie Fridays). If Discord knows that I made wet beef sandwiches with loaded fries for dinner, that’s no sweat off my balls. I don’t have conversations on there about anything that I would be afraid to shout in the Public Square.
Here’s my counterpoint: you may think what you do and say is innocuous, and it may very well be innocuous… right now. Who knows what people will think about any given topic in ten years. Who knows who’ll be in charge then, or how much power they may have to deal with “them”. I’m pretty sure I remember the dictator of some central-Asian former Soviet republic going around arresting dentists, so nothing is too absurd to consider IMO. I also don’t do anything I think others would find particularly damning, but I prefer to maintain a healthy buffer between my online self and my meatspace self. But I do genuinely wonder if I’m being unreasonably paranoid sometimes.
I personally think you underestimate what they can achieve with that data, or how much money they can make off it, or what governments can do with it. However, as long as you’re aware and okay with it, power to you.