this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
112 points (100.0% liked)

Privacy

789 readers
21 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

Chat rooms

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
k_o_t@lemmy.ml
tmpod@lemmy.pt
Yayannick@lemmy.ml
ranok@sopuli.xyz
112
Discord refuses to remove my phone number attached to my account (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Gush@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
21 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Hi, there's this situation i currently have with discord support, that they refuse to delete my phone number from my account. Basically every time i try to manually remove it, my account gets locked up until i add another phone number in order to continue accessing the service, "for security reasons" with no option for email verification (of course).

I contacted the support team asking for clarifications and if they could remove the phone number and, in short, they said that they couldn't do that since my account was flagged somehow, and that they won't remove the phone verification...

(their email)

Now, what are your opinions about this? Should i use a free voip number site in order to replace my real phone number with the fake one? My concern is that i don't know who could own that number so i don't know if it's safe to trust it, and i'm not willing to spend any money for this

top 21 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] quantenzitrone@feddit.de 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

delete discord from your life, fuck them

(if that is not an option for you, i understand but can't help unfortunately)

i did when they started to want my phone number

remember to use the GDPR to delete all your data, they need every message id from you for that, but with a bit of cat, grep and sed you can easily get that from a discord data package

[–] Gush@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Did you replace discord with something else? Or did you completely delete that kind of social in your internet life?

[–] quantenzitrone@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

Matrix (Element), Telegram and Signal

but most of it just got deleted

[–] haych@lemmy.one 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Discord doesn't care about privacy, if you do then Discord isn't the service for you. You could use a burner number, or host your web VoIP server where you don't need to worry about your privacy.

[–] Gush@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

how can i do that? is it costly?

[–] MaxHardwood@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago

A service like VoIP.ms you can get a DID (phone number) that supports SMS for a one time fee around $2 and usage fees around $0.001/minute

[–] olorin99@artemis.camp 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The cheapest option would be to just buy a cheap sim and verify the number with discord then throw the sim in the bin.

[–] Gush@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

don't they have monthly fees?

[–] v9CYKjLeia10dZpz88iU@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think Google offers free phone numbers through Google Voice. As far as I know, you can port in numbers too, so if you really wanted, you could get an inexpensive prepaid plan then transfer it to Google. (but I doubt there will be a problem using the Google Voice number that is assigned for free)

[–] olorin99@artemis.camp 2 points 1 year ago

You can get prepaid sims which don't renew automatically. You can also find carrier's that allow you to cancel whenever no extra charge.

[–] neutron@thelemmy.club 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Best bet is to purchase a prepaid sim card and activate it with an old spare mobile phone (if you have one, that is). This is how you get a "physical" number that's authentic enough for sms verification. This is assuming you live in a place where prepaid sims are sold freely and can be activated without hassles.

There are websites and applications offering "burner numbers" for situations like this or people living in places that place restrictions in new sim cards. Most of them tend to get their numbers from voip providers sold cheaply. They can work most of the time, but picky organizations like Google and Discord can and will probably detect voip numbers when it's the case.

My personal experience is that Google doesn't like it and refuse those ones, asking for an actual "physical" phone number. Discord, on the other hand, did accept voip numbers when I tried (around 2 years ago).

[–] Onihikage 4 points 1 year ago

To add on to this, after you verify your account with a prepaid sim number, you can port that number to a free VoIP service so it becomes useless for tracking you IRL but you can still use it to reset your password if needed. It's not like they keep checking after it's already verified.

[–] om1k@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

that's weird. I just opened discord and deleted my phone number without any issues, just had to type password and 2fa and done. I did it in the android app btw.

[–] Gush@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

I did it on android too, but that's not it. As i said, my account was flagged for some reason

[–] jarfil@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Their system has "triggered successfully", great news everyone! 😃👍

/s

[–] Gush@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'll keep you updated soon, i'm currently waiting for discord dpo department to respond to my second email explicitely requesting the erasure of my account since in the first email they tried to divert the request into suggesting me to contact the privacy email of Discord, but as we all know that email is just for privacy questions and doesn't do erasures of accounts under specific requests or laws by the sender. It's been one week, they still have more or less three weeks left to respond. If they don't i'll take action and report them to the authorities

[–] Hamerdown@feddit.nl 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can you change it in a non existing number.

[–] Gush@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

No, it needs to be verified