@everyone 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.
Thank you for sharing this.