Extremely creepy. Queued my account for deletion. Matrix it is.
Is it only for people who have put none? Or is it overriding people’s preferences?
You don’t give your gender to Discord when signing up. It’s also nothing to do with the pronouns that you can set with the integrated app/bot, that only counts for the server you’re in
It’s a backend identification, likely used to target advertising in the future.
They’re also tagging people with their suspected age bracket.
I believe it’s everyone.
From the article, it seems like it isn’t overriding preferences if you have it set in the app. Looks like it’s an analytics thing in the backend at the moment. Of course, I wouldn’t put it past them to eventually require ID if your settings don’t match their prediction.
Discord users when they get a pronoun slot to fill shouldn’t be suprised when it gets used by AI.
Man, everything about me will be fed to a machine somewhere eventually. I don’t have the resources nor will to go sufficiently off-grid to prevent that so I’ll just take people knowing my pronouns instead.
Oh cool the 100th article about Discord being a hot pile of dogshit.
Well everyone will still use it anyways
Lemmy users get so precious about privacy when it comes to every company except the ones that would be inconvenient for them to stop using.
Serious question: what is an alternative? They’re all dogshit.
It’s like everyone forgot teamspeak exists overnight
Discourse is a way, but matrix works as well
The alternative is IRC. I’m not sure why that’s not an option anymore when Discord is just IRC with a few extra features.
XMPP
I mean yeah, I guess, but why fix what was never broken?
IRC’s netsplits still haunt me in my sleep. jk
At least then when someone was considered a nuissance they got kickbaned instead of their account deleted because someone somewhere somehow got offended. Thicker skin crowd i guess, did allow for more discourse.
In IRC’s heyday online communication was mostly centered in groups (the channels) rather than 1:1. In the age of whatsapp 1:1 is king, kinda sad. It’s my perception at least.
I still do think XMPP is a better IRC though, more modern.
The gender thing is creepy, but if they could predict age groups then in a perfect world they could analyze adult users talking to children and shut that down.
In a perfect world though, I doubt they’d put effort into making their app safer, heavens no.
Not unless they’re forced to.
I don’t think the severe privacy consequences could ever justify any use of this
Pedophiles drive engagement so why would they be against that?
I identify as an attack helicopter, will AI figure that out?
Old joke is old.
Down to the model and loading.
r/onejoke
Never heard of that subreddit, then again I wasn’t on Reddit for long when the API migration began
But surely you’re aware how played out that joke is?
Apparently not, I’m not as chronically online so I’m like still in 2015 era, heck I recently ditched all my playlists and started listening to songs from 1960s like Elvis Presley
Most of the music I listen to is from the 1930s and 1940s and I still knew that joke comes from the paleolithic.
I also have a hard time believing you weren’t aware that was an old joke since you used the specific phrase ‘attack helicopter,’ which is what makes the joke so old, and not virtually any other phrase you could have used.
Let’s see if we can trick it into using a fictional gender. Like Andorians from Star Trek or something.
Alternatively, “it/that.”
What if my gender is undefined?
Discord: “Then we will define it.”
My gender is
null.My gender is not important.
male’); DROP TABLE Gender;–
'); UPDATE users SET gender = NULL;–
Then the wise and benevolent machine learning algorithm will make it so that it isn’t undefined anymore and you will live by it’s holy verdict.
My gender was assigned randomly at account creation
I asked people not to talk about me in my gender section. I’m just paranoid.
It’s been a pretty common practice for online companies for years. There are SaaS providers that offer APIs just for this purpose. At my previous job we implemented something like this too; making a rough guess at the gender of users based on just their name and some additional information. The only reason we did that is because we didn’t want to ask people for their gender when they registered, but we still needed a rough split for investor reporting and high level marketing strategy decisions.
I assume Discord would do this for similar reasons.
But why predict gender ? How do we use that information anyway ?
Oh so it’s perfectly ok then.
Politics aside, im interested in how this will predict my gender. Many people mistake me for a woman, from text, and I have been unsure as to why. I’m intrigued to see what this would predict, for me.
So, what is concern if ML model predict my gender ? Whether it is correct or not, what is the concern ?
It’s creepy and weird? If Discord is willing to do this then they’re likely to be/will be doing more things along these lines.
Gonna be real with you: I don’t really care if they’re using machine learning to try to predict my gender, as long as it’s not being forced to appear on my profile.
I have to agree. I don’t care if their own data analytics are wrong. If they think 80% of their users are women when it’s only 60%, that’s their problem, not mine.
Yeah Google simultaneously thinks I’m a teenage man and mid 40s woman. Like sure bud, whatever makes you happy.
Would be quite surprising if there was an ads-based platform that doesn’t do that. Age and gender are among the most relevant things when targeting ads.
Except discord is not an ads-based platform? I’ve never seen a third party ad on there
Fair enough. I don’t use Discord so I’m not sure but my understanding is that it’s free to use. So how do they fund it? I presume by collecting user data to target advertising or to be sold to 3rd parties.
My point here being that collecting data to figure out the user’s age and gender isn’t particularly uncommon.
It’s monetized through server boosts (upgrading a community to have premium features) and premium accounts that give users additional perks and features.
“Like other companies, we use information to help us understand our business and improve the product. That includes certain inferences we may make about users. We include this information in users’ data requests for transparency, and users can limit the information we use by toggling the “Use data to improve Discord” off in the Privacy & Safety settings.”
So nothing really interesting. They are allowed to make a guess at my gender, I don’t care. They don’t have 3rd party ads and don’t sell my data, so it’s cool.
I know this goes against the grain here and we love to pile on walled gardens, but it’s really nothing out of the ordinary.
I don’t see a valid reason to guess the gender of their users other than to sell profiles to ad providers. I can’t see how discord may evolve their discussion platform differently depending on the gender mix of their platform.
As https://lemmy.world/u/efstajas pointed out, it’s pretty common.
Discord doesn’t sell your data. They repeatedly state they don’t in their terms of service, and they would be in big trouble if caught lying about that.
Edit:
Discord’s privacy policy repeatedly states that they do not sell your personal information:
We don’t sell your personal information. Our business is based on subscriptions and paid products, not from selling your personal information to third parties.
We make money from paid subscriptions and the sale of digital (and sometimes physical) goods, not from selling your personal information to third parties.
We do not sell the personal data of our users or share personal data for targeted advertising purposes.
No sale or “share” of personal information: The CCPA sets forth certain obligations for businesses that sell or “share” personal information. We do not sell or share the personal information of our users as defined in the CCPA.
This is a legal document that they will get in trouble for if they were lying. They’ve already been fined hundreds of thousands of euros for GDPR violations but that curiously did not include a fine for “took people’s personal information and then sold them without consent whilst explicitly saying they didn’t do that”
Discord further has no third party advertisements which they can use to “sell” your data by allowing those advertisements to target you.
Thanks to a redditor for this write up
Trans folk
“Oh what fresh hell is this?!”
