Posted October 18, 2018 https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/9p5uyp/latest_tos_update_revokes_your_right_to_sue/ Quote From the Discord API server: Discord has changed their Terms of Service! Unfortunately, this change comes with a revocation of your legal rights. Discord has revoked your right to sue (you must go through an arbitrator) and to congregate as a class action lawsuit. Luckily, there is an opt-out for the clause, in which you must email arbitration-opt-out@discord.com, but you must do it within 30 days or you can no longer opt-out. YOU CANNOT DELETE OR DEACTIVATE YOUR ACCOUNT TO OPT-OUT OF THE ARBITRATION CLAUSE You can see the added clauses for yourself here: https://gist.github.com/Rapptz/c93697c9d59ec2f0d8071b7d0e907632 I will attempt to answer some common questions. Is this enforceable? In the United States, yes. This was decided by the Supreme Court in 2011. See https://gc.gy/7538114 In Europe, no. There are many clauses, a relevant one is Article 77 of the GDPR ("Right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority"). Why does this matter? Without the ability to congregate for a class action lawsuit, if Discord ever leaks your data or does something catastrophically bad to a large portion of the population you have no way to representatively sue together without each of you individually suing via the arbitrator. Please see the following article: https://gc.gy/7538130 Essentially: Your right to file a complaint in the court of law is removed. The arbitration system tends to heavily favour the company rather than the consumer. Since your right to pool similar complaints together is taken away, the amount of damage you can do to a company that has wronged you significantly is limited to those who are willing to arbitrate. Why should I care? Other companies do it too! By learning about this I hope that you will be more conscious about these arbitration clauses and how anti-consumer they are. You can't change the past, but you surely can't predict the future either. The top stickied comment to that thread is a staff reply, if you want to check that out. The gist of it is that it'll apparently protect them against frivolous lawsuits that law firms get rich off of. I had my worries about Discord and was reminded of what Stallman says about discord here https://stallman.org/discord.html. One of the pages he also links to there speaks about the possibility of discord selling their data in the future, even though they claim not to at the moment. Perhaps behind the scenes they're preparing to protect themselves for something like this down the road. One thing to note is that new accounts can opt-out 30 days after creation. Hopefully they'll add a notice about this in the account creation process in the future, or even better a yes/no dialog to make it easier. [Edit] Turns out Discord's CEO apparently has a shady past in which he sold his previous social platform to a Japanese company without any notice to users. The company then harvested all the data and shut down the platform, but not before being hit with a class action lawsuit. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/9peikv/in_light_of_the_tos_update_regarding_class_action/ [Edit] They changed it. The opt-out period is now 90 days and the arbitration clause now only applies to users within the US. https://blog.discordapp.com/terms-of-service-feedback-and-changes-c58a530c7693 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted October 18, 2018 Why does discord to make it pain to opt out? It should just be a option in client/interface. This is why I never go on board discord. Magical Pineapples
