Misinformation with privacy

There is a lot of scare mongering and misunderstanding of what certain things are being touted as being privacy focused. With one example being Discord, some thought that in general your conversations and DMs are private when in fact that has never been the case from the start. A vast majority of people have this misconception surrounding Discord when someone posted via Reddit that Discord had changed the wording in the terms of service. These changes were made to clarify Discord’s position regarding storing the contents of video and voice calls or channels while also stating that Discord does not store streaming content when you share your screen.

Unfortunately, Discord has not officially talked about the changes to their official channels but has pointed out why the changes were made via an article in PC Gamer.

It boils down to the fact that they had to remove those two lines as they are working on features that would be counter to the claims of not storing content. Those features would be creating voice recordings of replies and generating clips of live streams on Discord.

The thing was that for those posting the changes via Twitter, Reddit and other social media sites had framed it in a way that made the scenario sound much worse than what it was. Which is in effect the reason so many are confused about what happens when you communicate via platforms like Discord and Guilded. When you sign up for creating your accounts, you are in fact giving permission for these services to store and/or record user content. If you do not wish for them to have your content, your only recourse is to deactivate or delete your account.

For those of you who want a more privacy focused and control how your content is used, using a more open-source framework like Matrix or Revolt for your chat app needs. These platforms are focused on being a potential solution to those that worry about their user generated content. Of course, you do have a drawback as many of your associates are only on Discord and the like. Your reach and conversations will more than likely not be as fulfilling as it once was. There is not going to be a sudden shift of users from one platform to a more privacy focused platform overnight. It will take a long time for those to find these other platforms and to make their way over, even if they do there will be bumps in the road as the number of servers available is not at the level they are now currently on Discord. Then you also must be content with the groups who have created the servers to be able to handle the influx of users.