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Discord Servers asking for Phone Numbers and 'Verification Levels' (self.technology)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by CosmicCleric to c/technology

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] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 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 11 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?