Comment by jhanschoo
3 years 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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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.
> and if their relationship with you has soured, they have the option of nuking their messages.
How is that a feature?
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.
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."
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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.
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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.
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.
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This "feature" is placebo. All they have to do is save the data somewhere else and your "power" to delete the messages is gone. Simple screenshots will suffice.
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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.
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).