Hi, there’s this situation i currently have with discord support, that they refuse to delete my phone number from my account. Basically every time i try to manually remove it, my account gets locked up until i add another phone number in order to continue accessing the service, “for security reasons” with no option for email verification (of course).
I contacted the support team asking for clarifications and if they could remove the phone number and, in short, they said that they couldn’t do that since my account was flagged somehow, and that they won’t remove the phone verification…
Now, what are your opinions about this? Should i use a free voip number site in order to replace my real phone number with the fake one? My concern is that i don’t know who could own that number so i don’t know if it’s safe to trust it, and i’m not willing to spend any money for this
delete discord from your life, fuck them
(if that is not an option for you, i understand but can’t help unfortunately)
i did when they started to want my phone number
remember to use the GDPR to delete all your data, they need every message id from you for that, but with a bit of cat, grep and sed you can easily get that from a discord data package
Did you replace discord with something else? Or did you completely delete that kind of social in your internet life?
Matrix (Element), Telegram and Signal
but most of it just got deleted
You could delete the account.
I want that to be the last resort
Even if you change the phone number they’re going to keep a record of your previous numbers.
then i guess it would be the same if i “delete” my account?
Correct. You could use GDPR regulations to have them remove all your information once the account’s gone.
And then over time frame they are required to forget about you.
But they are never ever ever going to forget a phone number, they will call it a security matter and keep it for anti-fraud purposes. I believe that’s allowed.
Basically once your personal information is associated with a online account it is tainted. And if you are worried about your personal information being attached to an account you can no longer use that account because it is in fact tainted forever
So i guess i should delete this account and create another one in discord, because what i want to do is to bridge it with matrix. By the way i remember there was a site that could write examples of requests about deleting account informations under the GDPR, do you for istance remember this kind of site because i write like ass when it comes to gdpr requests and i’m not convincing enough to scare them.
edit: i found this useful website https://www.datarequests.org/blog/sample-letter-gdpr-erasure-request/ that writes a complete deletion requests under the gdpr laws. It even lists the data protection officer’s email from discord (which is where you should send your GDPR related deletion requests but that’s obviously not stated into discord privacy policy) plus other useful informations: https://www.datarequests.org/company/discord
Discord doesn’t care about privacy, if you do then Discord isn’t the service for you. You could use a burner number, or host your web VoIP server where you don’t need to worry about your privacy.
how can i do that? is it costly?
A service like VoIP.ms you can get a DID (phone number) that supports SMS for a one time fee around $2 and usage fees around $0.001/minute
The cheapest option would be to just buy a cheap sim and verify the number with discord then throw the sim in the bin.
don’t they have monthly fees?
I think Google offers free phone numbers through Google Voice. As far as I know, you can port in numbers too, so if you really wanted, you could get an inexpensive prepaid plan then transfer it to Google. (but I doubt there will be a problem using the Google Voice number that is assigned for free)
You can get prepaid sims which don’t renew automatically. You can also find carrier’s that allow you to cancel whenever no extra charge.
Best bet is to purchase a prepaid sim card and activate it with an old spare mobile phone (if you have one, that is). This is how you get a “physical” number that’s authentic enough for sms verification. This is assuming you live in a place where prepaid sims are sold freely and can be activated without hassles.
There are websites and applications offering “burner numbers” for situations like this or people living in places that place restrictions in new sim cards. Most of them tend to get their numbers from voip providers sold cheaply. They can work most of the time, but picky organizations like Google and Discord can and will probably detect voip numbers when it’s the case.
My personal experience is that Google doesn’t like it and refuse those ones, asking for an actual “physical” phone number. Discord, on the other hand, did accept voip numbers when I tried (around 2 years ago).
To add on to this, after you verify your account with a prepaid sim number, you can port that number to a free VoIP service so it becomes useless for tracking you IRL but you can still use it to reset your password if needed. It’s not like they keep checking after it’s already verified.
that’s weird. I just opened discord and deleted my phone number without any issues, just had to type password and 2fa and done. I did it in the android app btw.
I did it on android too, but that’s not it. As i said, my account was flagged for some reason
Their system has “triggered successfully”, great news everyone! 😃👍
/s
I don’t think there’s a chance a VoIP number will work at all as Discord detects and purposefully blocks them.
Can you change it in a non existing number.
No, it needs to be verified
I’ll keep you updated soon, i’m currently waiting for discord dpo department to respond to my second email explicitely requesting the erasure of my account since in the first email they tried to divert the request into suggesting me to contact the privacy email of Discord, but as we all know that email is just for privacy questions and doesn’t do erasures of accounts under specific requests or laws by the sender. It’s been one week, they still have more or less three weeks left to respond. If they don’t i’ll take action and report them to the authorities
