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Discord Servers asking for Phone Numbers and 'Verification Levels' (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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] -3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If you put more weight on your phone number than on your desire to interact with that video game community, then just don’t join the server and claim the moral highground.

So, blame the victim then?

You know there's another moral equivalence, that a server admin and a company shouldn't be asking for excessive security for recreational uses.

If email verification is not sufficient then they need to look into other methods of securing their servers, the onus is not on the user base to secure the server.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

And yet all websites seem to still exist using only email verification.

Yes, and unless you haven't noticed spam comments and fake account are rampant across most popular online services.

that a server admin and a company shouldn’t be asking for excessive security for recreational uses.

And yet most people don't care, and just add their phone number to their Discord account without a second thought; because it's not excessive, it's the norm. You can't even make an account on Instagram without providing your phone number, and in some cases and selfie while holding up a security code on a piece of paper to verify you are human. I'm not saying this slow creep into collecting user date should just be hand-waived away by virtue of it's widespread adoption, but the matter of fact is that if it was really viewed as such an egregious breach of privacy by the average person, then it wouldn't have survived since no one would be using the affected services.

they need to look into other methods of securing their servers

You seem to be willfully ignoring the fact that phone number verification is the answer to this question. Real people tend to have one phone number, fake phone numbers are easy to create but cost money, emails do not cost money.

Do you really not see the intrinsic benefit of requiring a phone number as the strictest form of online security for a tragically spam-laden service like Discord?

[–] [email protected] -2 points 9 months ago

And yet all websites seem to still exist using only email verification.

Yes, and unless you haven’t noticed spam comments and fake account are rampant across most popular online services.

Not agreeing with this, but also, ...

And yet all websites seem to still exist, using only email verification.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 9 months ago

they need to look into other methods of securing their servers

You seem to be willfully ignoring the fact that phone number verification is the answer to this question.

No, it's definitely an answer for Discord corporate. For the user base, not so much.

The onus is on Discord corporate and the server admins to deal with the problem, not for the user base to surrender their privacy to solve the problem.