I believe Discord is quite prolific for surveillance and data mining, but that's just what I've heard. Tumblr, I'm not sure how they could really spy on you unless you're using an app. If you're using it exclusively through a web browser, as long as you have privacy browser extensions and/or are using a browser that enables privacy features by default then you're probably pretty safe.
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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I am careful that way. Thanks for this.
I believe Discord is quite prolific for surveillance and data mining,
Discord does not take any information from your PC other than what you input directly into the app. There has been confusion in the past because it's game detection would scan your file system for known games, but it wouldn't send that data anywhere and was only using it to detect when you were playing a game in order to update your status. As far as surveillance goes, I've not seen any evidence that they make profiles of individual users to sell to advertising firms, but I do believe that they track general trends inside of public community servers and use that information for something. They also integrate with a lot of 3rd parties such as OpenAI which may be doing something with the data they're given. They do seem to genuinely delete messages if they are deleted, which is a plus.
Discord is awful for privacy. The owner has been caught a few times selling user data in ways they said they don't do. And the general suspicion increased when a Chinese company bought a stake in them.
ok, thanks. this is the kind of info i'm looking for. disappointed to hear but better to know.
If you want some privacy, you need to self host. You can use Mumble as a replacement for discord that you can host yourself.
Self-hosting on Mumble isn't going to help me join existing communities on Discord, is it? I already have an over-abundance of opportunities to talk to myself ;P
No, Mumble can't interact with discord.
There's a certain (understandable) mindset that if the service you are using has some form of "gate" to it that prevents the information from being easily scrapped on the web that there are certain privacy expectations. Discord for instance requires you to make an account, find a server, and then either join or be invited to the server. So there is an expectation that what you post (even within private messages) to only be for the people that have "access".
But the reality is (and has been proven many times now) that so long as a company has access to your data and can read/understand the data, they will sell that data to whoever wants to pay them for it (most often advertisers). This is true across websites, apps, and even operating systems.
Privacy is hard, and there aren't a lot of apps/sites/OSes that truly support it. Thankfully though, as people have started to take it more seriously more companies have started providing options to support the demand (my personal favorites are Signal and Proton).
"When you're not paying for a product, then you're the product"
That should explain Tumblr and free Discord. You should expect them to gather all data possible about everything you do, their apps to gather all information from your device that you might let them, then sell it to "the big data mining sites" that everyone else is also selling to.
"Enshittification allows double-dipping"
That should explain paid Discord. Even when you're paying for the service, they can make even more by also selling any data they can gather about you.
As for cookies, they aren't required to track you, or to create a shadow profile:
https://amiunique.org/fingerprint
As far as I can tell, there is no meaningful difference between the surveillance levels and data sales of Meta, Google, Discord, Tumblr, ex-Twitter, or Reddit.