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Discord Servers asking for Phone Numbers and 'Verification Levels' (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

76 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/10799766

(Edit: Cross-posted OP (link above) was mod removed by the Discord forum 'admin' on 2024-01-19 as being "False claim, false interpreted", so the above link will no longer work.)

Recently read this on a Steam game's reviews section ...

User Comment...

The game's Discord REQUIRES your personal phone number to get access at all. This is a very intrusive, and 100% unnecessary requirement, in order to just be able to interact with others about the game, it's content, player experiences, and many other things. It's also intrusive in regards to being able to contribute any input to help other players in any way at all.

Dev Response...

It's Discord that's asking you for verification of the account. We're not getting your phone number. This is standard practice on bigger servers that allows for a better user experience, filtering bots/ spam accounts, trolls, etc.

Could companies please STOP lying about it being Discord's choice, its not, is the Discord server's choice to ask for it.

Its a "Verification Levels" setting that the server op sets, and they have multiple options that they can choose from, its not an on/off switch. They can dial it back one notch and still have spam/bot protections.

The only difference between "High" and "Highest" verification levels is the addition of asking for a phone number, all other features of "High" is in "Highest", and "Highest" has no other extra features besides asking for the phone number.

Makes it really hard to have an pseudonym account on the Internet, for gaming purposes, and then be asked for your real phone number. I don't need to be tracked 24/7.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (8 children)

Nope, doesn't work that way. The game dev is offering a networked service (community,support,etc.)in his name/trademark/brand and therefore is therefore liable for the data protection, it doesn't matter at all if the dev is the data holder or not - that's up to the dev to manage contractually with discord.

The concept of "not holding the data, not liable for the data" has been turned down by various high court rulings by now - Amazon and Microsoft amongst others have tried it and lost.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (7 children)

Except that's not how it's working here. The only "contract" is the EULA that the developer agrees to when creating their discord account.

The developer doesn't collect or store the data, nor have they entered an agreement with discord for them specifically to collect this data. The game developer does not sell access to the discord server (a violation of the EULA). All they have done is use a feature on Discord, available to every user and bound to the terms of both the EULA and Discord's privacy policy.

If what you said was true, then any individual that enables the highest level of protection on any server of any size would end up being liable. This simply is not true. It would also mean that the lowest setting would also leave them liable as an email is stored, which is also not true.

It would also be incredibly hard to determine exactly what they're liable for. Is it all the users who have Discord? All the members in their server? What if a user is in multiple servers with phone/email verification turned on?

Discord collects this information as part of their service for their verification purposes, including 2FA. The implication for the developer is nothing more than a flag on an account.

The difference between the developer and Microsoft/Amazon is that those two companies, while yes they don't store it on their own servers, collect the data for use in their services for their profit for services they sell, run ads on, or collect more data to sell on. The game developer does not run discord, they do not sell discord, they have little agency over that server in discord, and is a service that discord provides. The game developer could pull out at any point and the service would still exist because it is not theirs.

TL;DR - The developer is not liable in the same way that X users aren't liable for people who verify their phone number following them. It's not their service, and the Discord EULA and Privacy Policy apply.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (6 children)

But if the developer makes a Discord "server" for their game community, they are telling Discord to set up a service. If the developer encourages people to join it and retains moderation rights, they're taking that service they ordered from Discord and providing it to other people. If the developer failed to get some legally required in their jurisdiction contractual terms from Discord about what Discord can and can't do with data on the people who use the service, the developer could get in trouble when they provide that service to people without the service following local laws.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

In that case, is a YouTuber liable for the GDPR failings of Google? Of course they aren't. It's the same here.

Is McDonald's liable for the GDPR failings of X? They have an account with their name and brand on it. They even pay X for a golden checkmark.

Is Taylor Swift or UGM liable for the GDPR failings of Spotify?

Are individual eBay sellers liable for the GDPR failings of eBay.

I could go on, but you don't quite seem to realise what the implications of what you're saying are if they are true. You're basically making every user liable for any GDPR on any service that collects any data. This isn't the case, or businesses wouldn't use these services.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

As long as what is going on here is basically comparable to what is going on when a company uses a third-party service as a peer to individuals, then yes, the company probably isn't somehow responsible for what the service is doing. Government Twitter pages have been found to legally constitute public forums, but that was in the context of restricting the government from blocking people. The person whose page it is still don't really run the place and probably isn't responsible for the actions of the platform.

But if a company hires another company to build and operate a communication platform for it (more of a Mailchimp or Invision Community situation), then you probably have a data controller-data processor style relationship.

So, is Discord more like Spotify or is it more like Mailchimp?

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