Not only do they keep your friend information on their servers, they maintain a copy of every single message you've ever sent via Discord. Their service is the antithesis of private communications.

Can you request deletion of these? I've never really thought about that before (I don't use discord that much anyway other than hoping on some channels occasionally to help beginners to rust and c++. I guess I'm not giving away too much there :)

Yes, you can.

Are you really going to request that deletion after every single sensitive conversation? That seems dumb. Also, are those deletions tracked? Like, do they say User A requested their conversation with User B and User C be deleted so that Mr Fed can still see that A B and C had that conversation?

There's just so so many places to get tripped up by keeping data rather than just routing bits and never storing them.

I was thinking more like "Hey discord, please delete all my old data from your databases, everything" not doing it after every "sensitive" conversation.

>Are you really going to request that deletion after every single sensitive conversation?

Just delete them manually then.

  Update Discord.messages 
    Set Deleted=True
  Where messageID='71d01110-e3d8-4673-9ba0-7bc676c5b6e6'

Deleted!

Also, every thing you've ever attached in a message (even 1 on 1 messages) have publicly accessible URLs.

There is no such thing as privacy on Discord.

Question: do you use Signal? If yes, are you backing up/syncing your contact list? If yes, are you worried about Feds coming for your backup/sync provider?

If that happens, that's not a disastrous thing. That means one person reveals who they're talking to in general, not just on Signal. It doesn't mean that the millions of Signal users all lose that privacy.

But no, I don't use Signal. I just think it's strange how some people can't seem to wrap their head around any of the rationale for this when it's the most transparent thing in the world. Do I like it? No, but it's ridiculous how some people pretend to be incapable of critical thinking in order to talk about how it's horrible. If something is actually horrible, being deliberately obtuse isn't needed.

I don't think you are getting it -- I am not talking about single user.

Whatsapp has 2 billion users, and they are pretty open that they upload entire user's phonebooks to Facebook-owned servers. We know Facebook is not worried much about privacy, so I am pretty sure that this data can be subpoenaed, sold and so on. If you care about privacy, you probably want to install something else, like Signal.

But you know what happens if you cannot get all of your friends converted at once, so you keep Whatsapp around? It will keep sending your contact list changes to Facebook, just at it is designed to.

Let me repeat this: you worry about metadata, so you want to chat to a friend via Signal. But the moment you add them, this is reported to all other apps including Facebook's Whatsapp. And there is no way to opt out of it.

How can people not notice this? How can any company call themselves "privacy friendly" and do this stuff?

No one knows which app you're contacting them on. Send them a text message and suddenly your activity is cloaked.

This isn't that hard.

Isn't your contact list encrypted? I mean wouldn't they have to hack my password (good luck) to do that?

When you backup to/sync via Apple or Google? No.