The GDPR is the EU’s attempt to making the internet a safer place. It tells corporations to follow their guidelines... or else. Among other things, it’s the thing that forces websites to ask you if it’s OK to use cookies and trackers, and it’s the thing that forces companies to allow you to remove your online data.

Discord is a chat app valued at over $15 billion. Discord makes money by offering a $9.99/month subscription called “Nitro.” Right? Or is something slightly more nefarious going on behind the scenes?

This article will take an in-depth look at the darker side of Discord, and what the GDPR has to do with it.

Discord was founded by a gamer. His name is Jason Citron. Jason has been interested in gaming since he was very young, he says. But Discord wasn’t his first project. On February 17, 2009, Citron launched OpenFeint. Its functionality was similar to Discord. The difference? It was built directly into mobile games. It showed a lot of promise and even Intel decided to invest $3 millon before finally being bought by a company called GREE for $104 million in April of 2011. But here’s the thing – It didn’t have Nitro. It didn’t have any sort of subscription.

Then gamers filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenFeint. Why? They claimed that it was "compiling and misappropriating its users’ personal information, including their gender, age, education level, geographic location and household income.” and “was then sold to third parties such as mobile-device application developers, advertising networks and web-analytic vendors without adequate notice or consent from consumers.” OpenFeint was shut down on December 14, 2012.

This leads to the obvious question: what is Discord doing with your personal data now? Here's an in-depth look from Reddit user u/cloudrac3r about Discord's personal data collection. Discord says they don't sell personal data, but similar to Facebook, there's a good chance they're either lying about that or finding loopholes in the definition of "selling."

Now, while we're on the topic of data, what if you want to, say, just delete it all. Discord gives you the option to do that. It's the GDPR law.

The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure of personal data concerning him or her without undue delay and the controller shall have the obligation to erase personal data...

- Article 17 of the GDPR

However, here's what happens when you delete your account:

An image of a discord user called "Deleted User b7b352ab" — Image credit of the author || @Litbelb

And yet all their messages in servers and DMs STILL EXIST. The only difference? Your name is "Deleted User [id]"

Erased accounts... aren't really erased, just hidden.

Discord also has multiple records of simply.. not deleting data when asked.

Is Discord really the bad guy here?

Discord certainly isn't perfect. Just because these are the things discord is doing, doesn't mean that you should stop using it. Simply be mindful of all the data that Discord has on you, and remember that it can never really be deleted.