Discord

Discord states it is 'not in the business of selling your information," which is great. That said, the way Discord manages data is currently largely vaguely defined. One of numerous confusing clauses is, 'We may also share aggregated or non-personally identifiable information with our partners or others for business purposes.' Discord says the do share data with third parties, including service providers like Google, Stripe, and Paypal. Discord also let us know they are in the process of updating their privacy policy to make it easier to understand for users. This is good to hear and will hopefully clarify some of the questions we found to be vaguely addressed in their current privacy policy.

Discord claims users can delete any message they have ever sent. Once a message is deleted, it is permanently deleted from their servers. If a channel, a server or a user account is deleted, all personal information is deleted too. However, we found the data retention section of their privacy policy a wonderful example of how a privacy policy can be made unspecific and confusing. Leaving it here in full: 'We generally retain personal data for so long as it may be relevant to the purposes identified herein. To dispose of personal data, we may anonymize it, delete it or take other appropriate steps. Data may persist in copies made for backup and business continuity purposes for additional time." While this may be rather standard privacy policy language, the vagueness leaves us with questions like, what purposes are relevant?, how is anonymizing data disposing of it?, and that last sentence seems to negate the first two. Vague privacy policies leave us scratching out head.