this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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Even simpler: don't do Discord.
I was invited to some Discord chatroom once: when I hit the website, the list of blocked scripts in uBlock Origin was longer than my arm. That was all I needed to close the tab immediately. I don't need to run 500 trackers from sketchy advertisement companies to join a glorified IRC chatroom with enough emojis and color to put an epilepsy sufferer in danger.
I'm not really sure what you did, but it certainly wasn't just opening discord.
I just tried it and there isn't a single third party script in the browser version according to Ublock and noscript, there are only three scripts activ in total, all from different Discord subdomains. Maybe a few more if there are media links in the chat.
If you look through the blocked connection requests they are also all made from the same source, namely the Discord science API, their internal data collector.
The Discord homepage has a Google integration and a few embedded YouTube videos, but it's hard to find a website that doesn't have some form of Google scripts.
Heck I don't even want to defend Discord here, but ia call bullshit on your story.
Try uBlock Origin in hard mode. You'll see how much garbage needs blocking that you don't see in easy or medium mode.
"Hardmode" is just a fancy name for blocking all 3rd party scripts, which there aren't even any to block here in the first place. What does happen is that two of the three Discord domains get flagged and blocked:
One is Discord.gg which is the Websocket to get and sent events, so it's needed for functionality.
The other is Discordapp.net which is pretty much their media server.
If you block all 3rd party scripts, frames and connections, then yes, your number of blocked items will shoot up into the hundreds. But if you knew what you are doing and just took a look at what was actually blocked, you would realise that it all was just requests for media and profile pictures. Even with fully enabled hardmode, there wasn't a single request from a 3rd party advertiser or data broker, not even Google.
Your arrogance for using hardmode is completely unfounded if you don't even know what it really is blocking. All you are doing is looking at a number go up and are patting yourself on the back for it.
Thank you for your service.
There’s an element of privacy fatalists around here who require no evidence for their claims and will doggedly ignore any evidence to the contrary. While I think zero-trust is a proper approach to security problems, propagandizing the technical aspect with hearsay and falsehood is useless.
Many tolerate it thinking we share a common enemy, but they’re wrong. Ignorance is the enemy, and tolerating it is why the community of privacy advocates is being swallowed by the much much larger community of online conspiracy brokers. Anyway, thank you for not tolerating it and doing your part.
Assume a company wants to maximize profits without losing privacy-minded users. I assume there is somewhat of an increase in cost, complexity, and latency if that company decides to collect data themselves and subsequently sell it to a data broker? Is there any actual privacy benefit? / Is there anything Google can only glean if their code is embedded into a site and they cannot simply collect after the fact? (Maybe routing time given their global presence or something kinda small…)
If there is any benefit to it depends on how discord sells your data.
The baseline assumption is that they just collect and sell everything as is, considering how shitty their privacy policy is and the general track record of corps following gdpr guidelins. With that barely anything changes.
If we belive the claims in their policies, then things get a lot better. Only aggregated and anonymized information is shared for marketing. Apart from that only their direct partners get more personalised information. Sadly, Google will probably get a lot of it since they are one of Discords cloud service providers but it should still be less then them collecting it themselves.
Now if we also assume they are following all GDPR laws, than even Google should only get very restricted information about you needed for their services.
What they really do with your data is anyones guess. I assume its somewhere between 1 and 2, but there is no proof I know of. The only benefit I really see is that it's a lot easier to just block the one Discord API instead of 500 individual brokers.
Are you scared of everything you don’t understand?