7 ms·

No, it fosters a less safe experience, when the behavior is hidden. For someone willing to spend just about 30 minutes, it isn't hard to have a script log in to

No, it fosters a less safe experience, when the behavior is hidden. For someone willing to spend just about 30 minutes, it isn't hard to have a script log in to your own account to record messages without anyone noticing.

jhanschoo 4y ago
That's against TOS, and my line of reasoning is that it helps against opportunistic and casual abuse, and there aren't really mitigations against more determined abuse. e.g. your relationship with someone has soured. Your IRC client has your private messages with them saved in a backlog. You can access them at any time. vs. you normally wouldn't save a backlog of messages because Discord remembers your message history, and if their relationship with you has soured, they have the option of nuking their messages.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > and if their relationship with you has soured, they have the option of nuking their messages. How is that a feature?
  - IanCal 4y ago
    I think that depends on whether you think of a message you receive as belonging to the person who wrote it or the person who is reading it.
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      Neither. I find this a weird notion. The message belongs to both sender and recipients. All of them, in case of one-to-many communication. If there's someone least entitled to message ownership, IMO it's the sender. To grant the sender the ability to take messages back is to allow them to encroach the "personal space" of the recipient - to make unilateral changes to the sphere of reality they considers their own. Physical analogy: to "unsend" a letter, you'd have to break into my house and steal it. Digital analogy: to "unsend" an e-mail, you'd have to break into my computer / mail server and delete it there. "Unsending" e-mail exists in corporate (organizational in general) contexts, but this is tied to an artificial environment following a much different sense of rules - those e-mails aren't truly yours, they're the property of the company (org) as part of which you're communicating. In the same way, corporate might let you "unsend" a physical letter too, at least internally. But this is an exception, tied to acting as an agent of an organization; private communications have different defaults. Also in general, as I mentioned in another branch of this subthread, I don't like solutions that let someone mess with someone else's perception of reality. "Unsending" is doing exactly that, so at the very least, it must not be silent - it must always leave a visible mark. "There was a message here. It was removed by the sender."
      - alwayslikethis 4y ago
        I agree with you. Analogously, I find the notion of forced read receipts to be weird. I can accept having a "delivered" status, to indicate that the message reached one of my devices, but a "read/seen" status is intrusive. The physical equivalent of this is sending an internet connected camera and let it send a message back if I opened your box.
      - IanCal 4y ago
        This is very much a framing issue and trying to apply physical interpretations on non-physical things. > Digital analogy: to "unsend" an e-mail, you'd have to break into my computer / mail server and delete it there. They're not on your computer or mail server though. They're on discords servers, which grant you permission to view them upon you providing credentials to prove you're allowed to see them. Removing the message is removing your access to content I have authored and previously granted. It wouldn't be weird for me to remove a blog or mastadon post of my own, yet those are very clearly one to many communications. If I hosted a page and gave you login details which I later rescinded, that wouldn't seem odd would it? None of these are conceptually all that different though. I write a thing and let you read it. I later don't want you to allow you to read it any more. Having granted access once, must that always translate to permanent irrevocable permission? That seems like an extreme position - the most obvious place that comes up is with mistakes. I mistakenly "send" a message to you intended for my wife. Do you have a permanent and fundamental right to it? If you've not even seen a notification that it's arrived, is it encroaching on your personal space for you to not be able to read a message I don't want you to read?
        HelloMcFly 4y ago
        > It wouldn't be weird for me to remove a blog or mastadon post of my own, yet those are very clearly one to many communications. But that's more of a forum or a publication than an interpersonal communication. I think when you and I talk, we both own the content. The conversation is two-way, and thus it is ours. You have no right to take those conversations from my email server any more than removing them from my mind. It's not about one-to-one or one-to-many, it's about is the conversation one-way or two-way. Are you talking to someone or with them?
    - noirscape 4y ago
      I think there's some overlap with recording phone calls here; some people do it, but do you need to get consent for doing it? Laws tend to vary quite a bit, but around here (not US or a lawyer, get your legal advice from someone else), you're allowed to record phone calls without mentioning it beforehand as long as you're a participant in the call itself. Basically the law surrounding phone call recordings suggests that for all intents and purposes, that right belongs to both entities independently. I'd apply the same to chat messages; the right to store them without prior consent belongs effectively to both parties.
      - djbusby 4y ago
        In Washington, USA, both parties need to be aware of the recording. It's why many IVR systems announce "this call may be recorded".
      - TeMPOraL 4y ago
        > Basically the law surrounding phone call recordings suggests that for all intents and purposes, that right belongs to both entities independently. I'd apply the same to chat messages; the right to store them without prior consent belongs effectively to both parties. Note however, that the law around mail and postal services suggests no such thing - on the contrary, once you send something, you lose your rights to it; you may have some residual rights for the duration of delivery, since the post is performing a service for you, but once the mail reaches its destination, its owned by the recipient. Chat messages derive from physical mail, not phone calls, so I'd apply postal rather than telecom perspective here. Phone calls are in some sense unique here: in its first widespread form, making a phone call meant creating a literal, direct electrical connection between your microphone and a speaker on the other end - an unbroken conduit going for dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of kilometers - in order to "teleport" the sound waves by means of converting mechanical waves to electrical waves, and back again at the other end - allowing to have a conversation across distance by pretending it isn't there. Those first phone calls were direct evolution of spoken conversation - as opposed to written messages, whose analogues were sent over a telegraph. Thus, in my mind, the right framework to think about IM chats and e-mails alike is through analogy to written letters and "snail mail" (if you really insist e-mails and IMs are not alike, then treat e-mails as similar to letters, and IM chats as similar to tiny notes passed around in the class by children, while the teacher is not looking). For phone calls, the right analogy is conversation. That extends to VOIP, Teams calls, Mumble/Teamspeak, etc. If you want digital voice communication that has semantics of mail, and not conversation, then we have that too: it's called voice messages, and is a feature in most IM platforms. To spell out clearly what that last point means to me: mutual consent for call recording sounds reasonable. But if you send me a voice recording over Messenger or WhatsApp, to me it's just as if you sent a normal chat - and therefore something that I'm free to back up without your consent or even without informing you.
  - jhanschoo 4y ago
    This is a feature because you can feel safer sending messages to people you currently trust that you are less comfortable sending to people you don't trust as much, knowing that you can delete these messages if your relationship with them starts to deteriorate and they likely wouldn't have access to them.
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      This is something I just can't feel. Maybe it's because I grew up with digital communications that did not have this "feature". In more general sense, the way I see it, a message does not belong to the sender - the ownership is shared between the communicating parties, and neither one should get to unilaterally delete it for the other, much like when you send me a physical letter, I can't prevent you from making a copy of it prior to sending, but you also can't "unsend" it by taking it out of my mailbox or cupboard. In more general sense still, I don't like things that can screw with people's sense of reality. At the very least, I hope "unsending" messages leaves a clear sign behind, because removing a message from someone's mailbox without leaving a trace is a stellar way to facilitate intentional or accidental gaslighting. But I'm rambling again. The main thing that needs to be said: > knowing that you can delete these messages if your relationship with them starts to deteriorate and they likely wouldn't have access to them This is just a really bad case of a false sense of security. The other person can always make a screenshot. And if you're known to be a person that unsends their messages, or if this becomes a more common practice in general, then the other party will likely start making screenshots the moment they realize your relationship starts to deteriorate. The messages still exist. For more serious cases, they can be dredged up from the backups by a court order, so you don't really get to unsend something and pretend it never happened.
      - jhanschoo 4y ago
        > This is just a really bad case of a false sense of security. The other person can always make a screenshot. Indeed, that's why I'm talking about people who you currently trust, and may not trust in the future. I will agree with you in part that there are situations even with currently trusted parties regarding certain information that it would be preferable that communication is permanent. There are modalities in communication where deletion is a feature and modalities where it isn't. edit: The situations I'm thinking of where such communication is preferable are less like "divorce-worthy" stuff, and more like "I'm not vibing with person A well rn, I don't like that they like <trivial thing a> and <trivial thing b>", which is relatively low-stakes, but essential to friendship. edit: here's a context I encountered yesterday; a friend (call them A) realized that some new people joined a Discord server that used to be close friends, and so A deleted their selfie pics. The reasoning (which happens intuitively and emotionally) is that if these people were slightly creepy, then they wouldn't be able to opportunistically abuse A's selfies if/when they started paying attention to A. If these people were massively and actively creepy there would be other avenues to handle that.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  If the data ended up on someone else's system you need to assume they can store it. Pretty much every IRC client ever has the option to save logs, everything from channels to private messages. Assuming someone can't save conversations is not wise.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  TOS doesn't matter. Select discord, windows+alt+R to start screen recording, middle click and drag to start scrolling slowly, walk away from computer.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > That's against TOS Nobody even reads those things anyways. What they "allow" doesn't matter either. As users we should be able to do whatever we want. If we want to log messages, that's our prerogative.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    But is TOS enforceable. That is the question. We have yet to properly test it in US court. I would like to finally get a binding court opinion whether a company can just put 'and we own your soul and youngest pet in perpetuity' and make cops come to your home to enforce that. I would like some clarity. Not this weird purgatory that benefits companies only.
    - Jasper_ 4y ago
      Companies have successfully forced people to go through arbitration through terms of service, with courts agreeing. ToSes, as a whole, are enforceable, though several lines in them might not be, just like contract law.
      - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
        Ahh, but by just moving it to arbitration it stops being contract law, does it not?
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  You like that it's easy for an abuser to hide proof of their abuse? I know what you're actually trying to say and I'm saying in reality you picked the wrong side bud, ignoring a very bad problem to protect against a comparatively trivial problem. If I were in a relationship that went bad, and the other person was as vengeful and irrational as you can imagine, and had access to everything I ever said, and did their best to cherry pick and strip context, sure, that would be annoying for me. And it would be no worse than annoying. I'll take that hit considering the kinds of things that other people do to other people. I'm clairvoiant, so go ahead and say it's about protecting gays in gay-murderering states. Perhaps you assume the only reason I take this stance is that I have nothing that I think could be weaponized against me. What kinds of things have you done in your relationships that you fear your past relations so much? Any way you slice it, wrong victim.
- philippejara 4y ago
  the messages are rendered client-side and there's no way discord will bother messing with detection of client-side bot "tampering" that scrapes the output, and that's assuming it would be even necessary to do it this way. It's entirely pointless, if someone wants to do harm with the information its trivial to get it regardless of TOS, and those that don't get the short end of the stick. At the end of the day the last thing discord cares about realistically is keeping their users "safe" anyway (and rightfully so in my opinion).

jhanschoo 4y ago

That's against TOS, and my line of reasoning is that it helps against opportunistic and casual abuse, and there aren't really mitigations against more determined abuse. e.g. your relationship with someone has soured. Your IRC client has your private messages with them saved in a backlog. You can access them at any time. vs. you normally wouldn't save a backlog of messages because Discord remembers your message history, and if their relationship with you has soured, they have the option of nuking their messages.

TeMPOraL 4y ago
> and if their relationship with you has soured, they have the option of nuking their messages. How is that a feature?
- IanCal 4y ago
  I think that depends on whether you think of a message you receive as belonging to the person who wrote it or the person who is reading it.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    Neither. I find this a weird notion. The message belongs to both sender and recipients. All of them, in case of one-to-many communication. If there's someone least entitled to message ownership, IMO it's the sender. To grant the sender the ability to take messages back is to allow them to encroach the "personal space" of the recipient - to make unilateral changes to the sphere of reality they considers their own. Physical analogy: to "unsend" a letter, you'd have to break into my house and steal it. Digital analogy: to "unsend" an e-mail, you'd have to break into my computer / mail server and delete it there. "Unsending" e-mail exists in corporate (organizational in general) contexts, but this is tied to an artificial environment following a much different sense of rules - those e-mails aren't truly yours, they're the property of the company (org) as part of which you're communicating. In the same way, corporate might let you "unsend" a physical letter too, at least internally. But this is an exception, tied to acting as an agent of an organization; private communications have different defaults. Also in general, as I mentioned in another branch of this subthread, I don't like solutions that let someone mess with someone else's perception of reality. "Unsending" is doing exactly that, so at the very least, it must not be silent - it must always leave a visible mark. "There was a message here. It was removed by the sender."
    - alwayslikethis 4y ago
      I agree with you. Analogously, I find the notion of forced read receipts to be weird. I can accept having a "delivered" status, to indicate that the message reached one of my devices, but a "read/seen" status is intrusive. The physical equivalent of this is sending an internet connected camera and let it send a message back if I opened your box.
    - IanCal 4y ago
      This is very much a framing issue and trying to apply physical interpretations on non-physical things. > Digital analogy: to "unsend" an e-mail, you'd have to break into my computer / mail server and delete it there. They're not on your computer or mail server though. They're on discords servers, which grant you permission to view them upon you providing credentials to prove you're allowed to see them. Removing the message is removing your access to content I have authored and previously granted. It wouldn't be weird for me to remove a blog or mastadon post of my own, yet those are very clearly one to many communications. If I hosted a page and gave you login details which I later rescinded, that wouldn't seem odd would it? None of these are conceptually all that different though. I write a thing and let you read it. I later don't want you to allow you to read it any more. Having granted access once, must that always translate to permanent irrevocable permission? That seems like an extreme position - the most obvious place that comes up is with mistakes. I mistakenly "send" a message to you intended for my wife. Do you have a permanent and fundamental right to it? If you've not even seen a notification that it's arrived, is it encroaching on your personal space for you to not be able to read a message I don't want you to read?
      - HelloMcFly 4y ago
        > It wouldn't be weird for me to remove a blog or mastadon post of my own, yet those are very clearly one to many communications. But that's more of a forum or a publication than an interpersonal communication. I think when you and I talk, we both own the content. The conversation is two-way, and thus it is ours. You have no right to take those conversations from my email server any more than removing them from my mind. It's not about one-to-one or one-to-many, it's about is the conversation one-way or two-way. Are you talking to someone or with them?
  - noirscape 4y ago
    I think there's some overlap with recording phone calls here; some people do it, but do you need to get consent for doing it? Laws tend to vary quite a bit, but around here (not US or a lawyer, get your legal advice from someone else), you're allowed to record phone calls without mentioning it beforehand as long as you're a participant in the call itself. Basically the law surrounding phone call recordings suggests that for all intents and purposes, that right belongs to both entities independently. I'd apply the same to chat messages; the right to store them without prior consent belongs effectively to both parties.
    - djbusby 4y ago
      In Washington, USA, both parties need to be aware of the recording. It's why many IVR systems announce "this call may be recorded".
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      > Basically the law surrounding phone call recordings suggests that for all intents and purposes, that right belongs to both entities independently. I'd apply the same to chat messages; the right to store them without prior consent belongs effectively to both parties. Note however, that the law around mail and postal services suggests no such thing - on the contrary, once you send something, you lose your rights to it; you may have some residual rights for the duration of delivery, since the post is performing a service for you, but once the mail reaches its destination, its owned by the recipient. Chat messages derive from physical mail, not phone calls, so I'd apply postal rather than telecom perspective here. Phone calls are in some sense unique here: in its first widespread form, making a phone call meant creating a literal, direct electrical connection between your microphone and a speaker on the other end - an unbroken conduit going for dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of kilometers - in order to "teleport" the sound waves by means of converting mechanical waves to electrical waves, and back again at the other end - allowing to have a conversation across distance by pretending it isn't there. Those first phone calls were direct evolution of spoken conversation - as opposed to written messages, whose analogues were sent over a telegraph. Thus, in my mind, the right framework to think about IM chats and e-mails alike is through analogy to written letters and "snail mail" (if you really insist e-mails and IMs are not alike, then treat e-mails as similar to letters, and IM chats as similar to tiny notes passed around in the class by children, while the teacher is not looking). For phone calls, the right analogy is conversation. That extends to VOIP, Teams calls, Mumble/Teamspeak, etc. If you want digital voice communication that has semantics of mail, and not conversation, then we have that too: it's called voice messages, and is a feature in most IM platforms. To spell out clearly what that last point means to me: mutual consent for call recording sounds reasonable. But if you send me a voice recording over Messenger or WhatsApp, to me it's just as if you sent a normal chat - and therefore something that I'm free to back up without your consent or even without informing you.
- jhanschoo 4y ago
  This is a feature because you can feel safer sending messages to people you currently trust that you are less comfortable sending to people you don't trust as much, knowing that you can delete these messages if your relationship with them starts to deteriorate and they likely wouldn't have access to them.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    This is something I just can't feel. Maybe it's because I grew up with digital communications that did not have this "feature". In more general sense, the way I see it, a message does not belong to the sender - the ownership is shared between the communicating parties, and neither one should get to unilaterally delete it for the other, much like when you send me a physical letter, I can't prevent you from making a copy of it prior to sending, but you also can't "unsend" it by taking it out of my mailbox or cupboard. In more general sense still, I don't like things that can screw with people's sense of reality. At the very least, I hope "unsending" messages leaves a clear sign behind, because removing a message from someone's mailbox without leaving a trace is a stellar way to facilitate intentional or accidental gaslighting. But I'm rambling again. The main thing that needs to be said: > knowing that you can delete these messages if your relationship with them starts to deteriorate and they likely wouldn't have access to them This is just a really bad case of a false sense of security. The other person can always make a screenshot. And if you're known to be a person that unsends their messages, or if this becomes a more common practice in general, then the other party will likely start making screenshots the moment they realize your relationship starts to deteriorate. The messages still exist. For more serious cases, they can be dredged up from the backups by a court order, so you don't really get to unsend something and pretend it never happened.
    - jhanschoo 4y ago
      > This is just a really bad case of a false sense of security. The other person can always make a screenshot. Indeed, that's why I'm talking about people who you currently trust, and may not trust in the future. I will agree with you in part that there are situations even with currently trusted parties regarding certain information that it would be preferable that communication is permanent. There are modalities in communication where deletion is a feature and modalities where it isn't. edit: The situations I'm thinking of where such communication is preferable are less like "divorce-worthy" stuff, and more like "I'm not vibing with person A well rn, I don't like that they like <trivial thing a> and <trivial thing b>", which is relatively low-stakes, but essential to friendship. edit: here's a context I encountered yesterday; a friend (call them A) realized that some new people joined a Discord server that used to be close friends, and so A deleted their selfie pics. The reasoning (which happens intuitively and emotionally) is that if these people were slightly creepy, then they wouldn't be able to opportunistically abuse A's selfies if/when they started paying attention to A. If these people were massively and actively creepy there would be other avenues to handle that.
giantrobot 4y ago
If the data ended up on someone else's system you need to assume they can store it. Pretty much every IRC client ever has the option to save logs, everything from channels to private messages. Assuming someone can't save conversations is not wise.
Dylan16807 4y ago
TOS doesn't matter. Select discord, windows+alt+R to start screen recording, middle click and drag to start scrolling slowly, walk away from computer.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
> That's against TOS Nobody even reads those things anyways. What they "allow" doesn't matter either. As users we should be able to do whatever we want. If we want to log messages, that's our prerogative.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  But is TOS enforceable. That is the question. We have yet to properly test it in US court. I would like to finally get a binding court opinion whether a company can just put 'and we own your soul and youngest pet in perpetuity' and make cops come to your home to enforce that. I would like some clarity. Not this weird purgatory that benefits companies only.
  - Jasper_ 4y ago
    Companies have successfully forced people to go through arbitration through terms of service, with courts agreeing. ToSes, as a whole, are enforceable, though several lines in them might not be, just like contract law.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      Ahh, but by just moving it to arbitration it stops being contract law, does it not?
Brian_K_White 4y ago
You like that it's easy for an abuser to hide proof of their abuse? I know what you're actually trying to say and I'm saying in reality you picked the wrong side bud, ignoring a very bad problem to protect against a comparatively trivial problem. If I were in a relationship that went bad, and the other person was as vengeful and irrational as you can imagine, and had access to everything I ever said, and did their best to cherry pick and strip context, sure, that would be annoying for me. And it would be no worse than annoying. I'll take that hit considering the kinds of things that other people do to other people. I'm clairvoiant, so go ahead and say it's about protecting gays in gay-murderering states. Perhaps you assume the only reason I take this stance is that I have nothing that I think could be weaponized against me. What kinds of things have you done in your relationships that you fear your past relations so much? Any way you slice it, wrong victim.
philippejara 4y ago
the messages are rendered client-side and there's no way discord will bother messing with detection of client-side bot "tampering" that scrapes the output, and that's assuming it would be even necessary to do it this way. It's entirely pointless, if someone wants to do harm with the information its trivial to get it regardless of TOS, and those that don't get the short end of the stick. At the end of the day the last thing discord cares about realistically is keeping their users "safe" anyway (and rightfully so in my opinion).