I'm biased, as I lead the Zulip project. But I think this is a reasonable place for me to post some thoughts. Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like Discord, Google (Gmail), and Meta have databases with access to the private conversations of hundreds of millions of people with their closest friends and family members, linked up with…
I think Apple / Google need to implement verification on the device - we already accept the device knows who we are. And then social media platforms should be able to have the device confirm the user is over 18 and that’s all they need to know.
Happily walking right down the path they are leading us down...
A world where nothing can be accessed except through a Google or Apple hardware-attested, photo ID verified device
I think Apple / Google need to implement verification on the device - we already accept the device knows who we are. And then social media platforms should be able to have the device confirm the user is over 18 and that’s all they need to know.
This only applies if you take all those "protect the children" initiatives at face value. It seems to me that the actual reasons are different. Governments want to police speech online and be able to arrest people who say things they don't approve of, so they are pushing platforms to collect user's PID. Some also want to discourage people from doing things they don't want them to do but that are politically unfeasible to criminalize (watching videos of consenting adults engaging in all kinds of sexual acts) and adding more and more friction to the process (no pun intended!) is the best thing they can get. And the internet companies want more of your data to track you.
I'm biased, as I lead the Zulip project. But I think this is a reasonable place for me to post some thoughts. Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like Discord, Google (Gmail), and Meta have databases with access to the private conversations of hundreds of millions of people with their closest friends and family members, linked up with…
>>Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be I've been putting my pants on every morning for the last several years, had breakfast, gone to work, and come home without worrying about any current events in the USA and my life seems no different than 50 years ago except I have modern gadgets. Social media is not the world. In fact, it's 10% of what the real world is like and how…
I hope Discord understands the risks they pose to their audience when they open source their IDs again. Discord is used by a bunch of closeted users having pseudos, who wouldn't do the same activities on it if everyone had their names. A part of the Discord users is from countries from which Discord isn't even officially accessible (eg China) or where involvement in LGBT discussions could result to death row (Afghani…
Discord also calculates a whole lot of (inferred) demographic information. Estimated age, gender, and surely much more. They also feed all the messages into a ML model, which guesses what people are talking about, and pushes a notification to other users. This is probably the culmination of all that, this is why they refuse to be e2e like every other reasonable messaging app...
Discord is focused on large groups. E2EE doesn't work in this case. Group management overhead traffic is too high and too unreliable, and a bad actor could just join the group under a pseudonym to log messages. Discord isn't E2EE for the same reason Hacker News isn't.