IMPORTANT INFORMATION REGARDING WIPING YOUR MESSAGES

[abigailwillow]

For a while now I have been talking with Discord's privacy team about bulk-deletion of messages. Initially they were very persistent in their stance to not allow users to bulk-delete their messages. However, I pointed out to them that this is by any and all means not compliant with GDPR policies, especially since deleting your account (which is the solution they kept offering) does not get rid of any your messages either.

Therefore I decided to go the extra mile by contacting my national data protection authority. Not long after filing my complaint to the DPA, Discord's support got back to me after a long period of them ignoring my emails by allowing me to provide a list of IDs of DM and guild channels that I wanted my messages wiped from. They have since processed my request and my messages in all channels I provided were successfully instantly wiped.

Unfortunately at the time of writing, Discord still does not allow users to bulk-delete messages themselves. But it seems that they are accepting such requests via support tickets.

I have obtained the channel IDs from my data package and provided them with a comma-separated list for the channels I wanted to have wiped.

If anyone reading this decides to make a similar request, please let us know about the outcome. Together we can help make Discord a better place that actually respects the data protection rights of its users.

Data Deletion Request Template

To: support@discord.com
Subject: Data Deletion Request

Hi,

I have recently requested my data package from Discord and found some data that I would like to have wiped in compliance with GDPR.
I would like to request all my messages from the channels with the following IDs to be deleted:
123456789123456789, 234567891234567891, 345678912345678912, 456789123456789123, 567891234567891234

I would have done this myself, but unfortunately this still isn't possible.

Thank you in advance,
[Your Name]

[ghost]

I wasn't able to achieve this. I tried to contact support and told them I want to delete these messages on this specific channel. Also gave them the specific ids for server and channel. But they said they don't bulk-delete messages because my messages serve important context to the conversation. Even though that channel is constantly getting messages and nobody reads older messages in that specific channel.

[abigailwillow]

They gave me the same answer initially, I told them that I obviously don't care about the context. In fact it's almost the entire point of bulk-deleting.

I kept pressing them and as stated in my post above I contacted my national data protection authority, and they basically 'out of nowhere' after over a month of radio silence from them (despite me sending them multiple follow-up reminders) replied to me again after I contacted the DPA about a possible GDPR violation.

Discord is really bad about this, but I'd encourage you to do the same and contact your national DPA. Best of luck!

[ghost]

Thanks for the reply and I'll do that

[TCNOco]

Were you able to get them to do it?

[ghost]

I'll give an proper update once Discord answers to my latest email

[ghost]

To note, I haven't contacted DPA yet and I haven't made that point that when deleting account the messages won't be removed, to support. They have kept saying to me that "they are happy to delete specific messages which are in inaccessible areas." To be clear my messages aren't in "inaccessible areas" but I still provided them the IDs (all message IDs and the specific channel ID) but haven't heard from them since.

[Deemo82]

I just wanna pop in and say some things from my experience the first email had a great response and they basically said give the channel ID’s and message ID’s and they’ll take care of it for us problem is there was about 50k messages we sent a second email and we got a different individual this person we felt like we were talking to a robot who 100% was copying and pasting the same email to everyone from the looks of the tread we got the same email twice there was 2 people trying to get messages deleted in our group.

The email caused outrage I am not even joking they said the equivalent of your personal data is not important to us we care more about other individuals then you because it might cause confusion for them we know it’s your personal data but we don’t care we understand it’s your right to request it to be removed but we don’t care about that either again others are more important than you thank you very much that’s basically what they told us.

Personal note’s

You can get your messages deleted as per your rights even if it means you have to bully them into doing it they literally got find €800,000 as of recently by a French company for breaking GDPR they were withholding data for people who haven’t used Discord for years and not informing individuals that they were still in calls after they have turned off Discord i’m pretty sure there’s other things too but that’s the bullet points (In our situation we got everything dealt with privately with the server owner) Discord will cave the law is on your side especially if your a European Citizen you just gotta keep pushing it.

Also it is completely unreasonable how much you have to do in order to get them deleted in the first place it should just be an email with the server ID and then it be the end of it especially for non-tech savvy people.

PS: thanks to abbydiode for their help.

[abigailwillow]

I have had the exact same experience with them basically saying that your data protection rights are not as important to them as preserving the context for other users. As you said, all European citizens, have the right to be forgotten, and you can definitely push them into wiping your messages for you if you push hard enough. In my case they stopped responding so I actually wrote a complaint to my national DPA before they finally took my case seriously.

I'm spreading this message and helping others get these requests succesfully processed in the hopes that one day they will let users do this themselves without having to create support tickets, facing fierce resistance, and jumping through all kinds of hoops. Glad to hear you were successful in the end.

[freddcurrys]

@abigailwillow
A question to the DPA. While filling out the contact to the national DPA, I assume you had to enter your location address. Did you ever got any letters or mail from your DPA sent to your location? Weird question, but I wanna be sure what am doing :D

[abigailwillow]

I've had my DPA send me letters as well as contact me by phone and email. It's a little bit random which communication method they use, but they do indeed sometimes send letters to your address.

[Deemo82]

I’m currently experimenting whit template’s with my friends and sending them to Discord. If we find a working one i’ll make sure to let everyone know and make a video on it that way everyone can have there rights respected. I’m going to post my third draft of the template I would really appreciate if there’s any comments you can make to make it better or share a working one you have so I can improve on it. Everyone is welcome to use this one I don’t know if it works yet were currently finding out. This is the one going to be sent to discord we will find out soon.

[Deemo82]

Hello I’d like my personal data regarding my messages deleted.

Channel ID’s
( )
( )
( )
…

I’d like all messages in those channel’s to be deleted i’m not giving message ID’s because I want everything gone which should be easy for you considering you have the channel’s and my account.

I understand you might have concerns about the context for other users. I don’t really care about the context for other users my privacy should come first and if you disagree that’s a conversation you should have with my national data protection authority’s. I’m exercising my right to be forgotten thanks.

PS: I’d recommend adding bulk deletion as an option in the privacy section of Discord It would be beneficial for everyone. Including those who can’t delete all messages off of servers they don’t have access to. It’s ridiculous that we have to go through all these hoops on your platform.

-regards (alias name)

[Deemo82]

By the way I went through a bit of their TOS privacy department is where you wanna go for this situation.

(ignore my battery I just grabbed my iPad to take the screenshot)

[TCNOco]

Did the email work?

[Deemo82]

To be honest with you lad the email was only sent today so I’ll find out when they respond

[abigailwillow]

I sent them a comma-separated list of channel IDs, I assumed it'd be easier for them to work with. I would also suggest to keep it short, that way they can process your email faster. Enough of these should definitely get the point across.

[MasicoreLord]

Surprised you didn't get an error for too many requests discussions when attempting to post this /j

[Deemo82]

Okay so tiny update I sent it to the wrong department and some guy who’s job it was just to explain the TOS was just there like 😬 because I had basically sent him a hitpiece the message links lead to a private server which I had transferred to my friend where I completely shit talked discord and called them weirdos for some of their policies I can give more information on that but not here I don’t think that would be appreciated.

Anyways I haven’t followed up with it kind of forgot about it and I don’t really feel like doing it today only reason I’m back here is because I got a email on my protonmail account.

I’m just popping in to say if you got the same email I put it into virus-total It gave me 7 red flags so don’t click the link It was posted here and I presume it was deleted but I still got an email for it so some of y’all probably did too I’m just here to say don’t click on that shit that’s all.

i’ll probably do a follow-up after New Year’s and happy late Christmas to everyone.

[abigailwillow]

Which email address specifically did you send it to that it wasn't supposed to go to? I had assumed dpo@discord.com would be the right one since someone mentioned it in a post somewhere in this discussion, is that not correct?

[Deemo82]

I sent it to the privacy department linked on the website turns out what they consider privacy is clarifying there TOS typical.

[TCNOco]

I have just submitted my own request using a similar template as mentioned above to the Discord support requests page, with a little more pleading and reasoning... I do hope something is done. Will update when I get a response.

[TCNOco]

I'll share the script I've worked on here once everything's done.
Basically .py parses all csv files in the data package/messages folder.
Saves all messages in plain text for a single channel, and asks 1, 2, or 3 (ignore, 404, to delete) -- Ignore if it's fine, 404 if I run the channel through victornpb/undiscord and it comes up with 404, otherwise to delete if I run it through and see 403 (no permission, I must not be on the server anymore).

The list of "to delete, no access" is what I'm putting together into this email.

[TCNOco]

Try sending my template completely unmodified it wouldn’t do you any harm it’s made to counteract their bullshit

Did it work for you? Did they delete all of your messages in the channels you mentioned?

[abigailwillow]

Did it work for you? Did they delete all of your messages in the channels you mentioned?

I've personally sent an email similar to the template you can find in the original post and gotten several channels completely wiped without a need to list specific messages.

[TCNOco]

I've sent practically a carbon copy of the email from @Deemo82 (Dec 12, 2022). Will update you, and for now prepare a list of messages incase nobody understands again.

[TCNOco]

Nope, same carbon copy email response. From the "Legal Team", not Clyde. I have prepared a list of channels and messages anyways. I will send those in a response.

[AthAshino]

Hey
I tried to ask them 6 month ago. And after ignoring me every time they closed the ticket with the "context" excuse. I did insist a lot of time, using the fact that the CNIL (french legal organisation) took action against them but they didn't care at all.
Today I'm trying it again by creating a new ticket, hoping someone else will get it and correctly wipe my data this time.
I don't understand how they can keep violating our rights even after being sanctioned..

I will update when I receive an answer (maybe in a few month)

[AthAshino]

Yes, I will try, but last time when I sent them just channel Id they were asking for specific message id

[abigailwillow]

People in this thread, including myself, have had success with just channel IDs. Howerver it could just depend on who's answering your emails unfortunately.

[Deemo82]

Message IDs have been the problem throughout the entirety of the thread I see you having 3 options

A) you wait until there is a viable method to go through your data package and extract message ID’s from individual servers into a text file.

B) you wait until discord get fined and are forced to change their policies

C) Just keep going at it until you get results.

Now that’s just my personal opinion but I am genuinely considering tipping off the data protection commission (same people who tried to kick Facebook out of Europe) and hopefully they would do something.

[abigailwillow]

I am genuinely considering tipping off the data protection commission

This is what I did. Having more people send in complaints would only strengthen our case. I would seriously encourage anyone facing any kind of issues relating to this to reach out about it. I'm still waiting for an answer from my data protection authority, and I hope I can post an update about it soon!

[AthAshino]

Here we go

I'm doing to call the data protection commission, it seems to be the only way for them to understand that they're against the law

[ghost]

Heya, I know some individuals here have had success in getting Discord to bulk delete their messages.
But does anyone know if it'd be possible to get them to delete another's messages as well i.e. wipe a whole DM channel?
I found a closed DM in my data package and I hate the thought of having data I can't access.
And I'm totally not afraid to contact authorities either.

[Deemo82]

Apologies for any spelling mistakes I was in the middle of something when I got the notification so I just had to put it together real quick @anon813

[Deemo82]

I hope they saw my message before deleting there account it would be a shame if they didn’t

[ghost]

Hi again!
Sorry for worrying you, I sent my ticket but it being so unorthodox stressed me and I deleted the github account woops.
But also I just want to clarify I am not in any danger myself and I just want to see if I am able to pressure Discord into wiping a whole dm. Cause I disagree with data in closed dms still being stored, and not being able to wipe dms in general.
But I only just sent a (lengthy) ticket so it might be a while until I get a response.

[ghost]

Unfortunately they also gave me exactly the same response they gave to others here, almost a copy paste. I'll send another response and see what happens.

[ghost]

Their team keeps asking me to send specific message IDs as they did with many other people here. However because I am trying to get the whole DM wiped I do not think this method will work. But I hope the rest of you can get your messages bulk deleted because it is entirely within your rights.

[Deemo82]

Alright so new discovery I just made Discord delete your email off there servers within 14 days when you delete your account meaning you can’t legally prove that whatever messages that were sent from a deleted account are yours meaning GDPR law does not apply to deleted accounts because all messages are anonymized it’s very unfortunate for me in my case because 14-year-old me said some stupid stuff so I hope you learn a lesson form my mistake do not delete your account until those messages are gone only deactivate.

[Deemo82]

Trying a different approach i’ll keep you all updated on how it goes.

[Deemo82]

Ok I’ve been in a long email exchange with Discord for a while after my last update discord flat out denied my rights and I’ll be on a phone call with Irish government officials after the bank holiday I’m not sure how much I’m legally allowed to disclose but I will let you know if I’m successful.

[AnnoyedDev]

Hey @abigailwillow I am sincerely sorry if I have offended or hurt anyone. I must admit that my intention was not to hurt but to inform, and it turns out that I did it poorly. To qualify and try to excuse my poorly worded message, I had consulted with the data protection department in my country and at the European level, and I also contacted a lawyer (from my country). The lady who answered my call (from the data protection department in my country) talked to me a bit as if I were an idiot, explaining what I had explained, being a bit upset that is the reason why I expressed myself poorly, sorry once again, I hope my message, even if it was clumsy, was understood...

[abigailwillow]

No hard feelings @AnnoyedDev! I don't think you offended anyone! It's always nice to have new information from local Data Protection Authorities as they are in the end the relevant authority on this. Do I correctly understand that they told you that messages are excluded unless they specifically contain personal information? Also for context which country's DPA is this regarding? Any new information on the topic is always appreciated.

[AnnoyedDev]

@abigailwillow That's right, they explicitly told me that message that Discord were mandatory to delete were message that could identify me. They also told me that if i want more information and to have more precise information about my specific case i would need to make a complaint. I'm located in France, my DPA name is CNIL.

[Deemo82]

Ok so I did my own research and looked into the matter so I can contribute towards the conversation and the information I have found is individual member states maintain the right to pass their own data protection laws individual member states decide how strict their data policies are themselves with GDPR being the minimum set across the entirety of Europe it’s still the responsibility of the member state to decide what conduct is allowed and isn’t allowed under GDPR that’s why @abigailwillow case was considered a violation of GDPR and your one wasn’t @AnnoyedDev it’s depending on the member state you’re in and what extra powers they have allotted to GDPR each member has a different policy basically that’s what I’m seeing but if they have no policy, they just rely on the bare bones GDPR which is the framework they have to build off of.

[abigailwillow]

Makes sense considering my DPA is the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens of the Netherlands and our government tends to be relatively secure with privacy-related issues. I suppose these differences between member countries also make it more challenging for these companies to know which rights their users have as it can differ quite a bit per country.

[RaxVander]

everywhere i tried its always can anyone help me?
Error searching messages, API responded with status 401!
{"message":"401: Unauthorized","code":0}
CoreException {}

[Qgw792]

[abigailwillow]

If you can identify that you are the owner of the deleted account then I think it'll be fine, they won't check if you are or aren't in an EU country. Besides, perhaps your country or local authority has similar regulations?

[abigailwillow]

Most likely they'll require you to contact them from the email address that was previously registered with them. But they might give you a hard time since the account is already deleted. If this is regarding the US then check if your state has similar laws in place to GDPR. For example, I believe CA does.

[Deemo82]

To be completely honest under the table they would probably click like one message just to make sure that the links work and then they would just feed every single one of the message links into a system to delete all the messages for them so that way not manually doing it they wouldn’t manually delete thousands of messages it would be a script of some sort.

[Deemo82]

Great news everyone an old acquaintance of mine successfully got his messages deleted by Discord!!! he created a bot to scrape all the message links and put them into a text file sent them off to discord and they deleted everything without a hitch only caveat is messages in threads weren’t touched but altogether it was a success.

[Deemo82]

Personal information being your real name address use your common sense

[Deemo82]

Okay so the difficult thing is it’s completely anonymized just because you can prove one of the messages on the account belong to you doesn’t mean that the next deleted user is the same person they will only delete the exact message that you’re able to prove belong to you they physically have the account mixed in with millions of other accounts they can’t tell it apart there’s no unique identifying parts in the code that says that this user is connected that’s what anonymized means. Discord will only delete messages that you can prove “””individually””” belong to you or contain personal information.

[Deemo82]

When this thread originally opened up my first round of experimentation relating to getting discord to delete messages was actually on a deleted account I was lucky to get in contact with a human and that person told me point blank there’s no hope when it comes to deleted account’s because they can’t identify who is who with enough accuracy for it to be worth the trouble that’s why they deal with everything on an individual message basis when it comes to deleted accounts. That’s what I got from my interaction with the individual from the general support on the discord white page of doom.

[abigailwillow]

I think it's a totally logical expectation to believe that your messages will be deleted as well when you delete your account. As for identifying deleted accounts, I'm 99% sure under the hood they still have your unique user snowflake. Can you right-click your deleted account and copy it, if you have it turned on in developer settings? That should realistically help them identify all your messages.

Converting the data package to a list of message ids shouldn't be too difficult, but I don't have the capacity right now due to personal circumstances. I'll see what I can do.

[abigailwillow]

The long string of numbers you mentioned is the snowflake I mentioned, as for a data package if you haven't yet requested one before then you can't request one anymore now as the account is deleted, though technically speaking if you could prove the account used to be yours they should provide you with one.

Getting banned and not having a way to delete your messages or otherwise no longer having access to your messages is one of the biggest problems I have with the whole system. This is what I pressed them on before they complied with my request as I personally believe it's very much infringing on users' privacy.

[McDic]

When I first submitted an inquiry on their customer support center, their first reply was "Deleting message should be inquiried via (some other link)", because "it is beyond CS's resources".

After their first reply I pushed them with strong arguments, and they said I need to export a list of discord message IDs via privacy package.

After I passed them a list of discord message IDs, they said I have to reformat those IDs in following form; (They did not tell the exact form at the first, I guess this is because they wanted to delay message deletion process as long as possible)

Channel ID:
Message ID, Message ID, Message ID

Channel ID:
Message ID, Message ID, Message ID

...

After a week they said my messages are all deleted, but many of my messages WERE NOT DELETED at all. Therefore I reported the Discord on some national privacy-related instituitions including KOPICO.

After a public servant sent an email to the Data Protection Officer, they finally deleted(at least those were invisible) almost all my messages(but there were still few left) and they added the "Korean local terms".

Discord is not deleting your messages easily. They will try to give you many excuses if you seems not urgent. You should prepare your plans properly, and need to push them hard.

If you are interested about my code to export list of discord message IDs, check my repo.

[Deemo82]

Very much appreciated i’m sure this will be a great help to everyone hopefully now we’re going to start getting more and more people trickling in saying they successfully got messages deleted thank you @McDic 😄 it’s unfortunate that you had such a hassle but it’s good because around 3 or 4 people have managed to get messages deleted now that’s a big step up from only one person and we seem to have a working method thanks again for sharing your resources it’s a big help for everyone.

[Qgw792]

[abigailwillow]

Absolutely atrocious, but it's important to point out that this does not affect anyone outside of the United States of America. Any US citizens should opt out of the arbitration clause as soon as possible. Opt-out templates are available for free online if anyone reading this is wondering how to do that.

[ASerinYellsNotCute]

On March 29, I sent email to Discord(dpo@discord.com) that I want to exercise my rights to delete my messages based on South Korea local terms, it might be the similar case with @McDic since I live in Korea.

At the first email I attached a zip file containing text files named with channel ids and each file contained the message id contents that I want to delete.

First email from me:

Second email from Discord:

Third email from me:

Fourth email from Discord. This time they have accentuated me to match the form with bold text:

Discord really wanted me to match the form with this in the email contents as McDic said:

Channel ID:
Message ID, Message ID, Message ID

Channel ID:
Message ID, Message ID, Message ID

I assume this is because of their system limitations. It can be wrong. I'm just guessing.

I wrote a simple python script to match these forms and sent it with reply. I told them I don't care about the context issues since I told my friends and acquaintances about my deletion process.

(The image containing IDs are more than this, but it's extremely long to fit in an single image)

1~2 weeks later, I found that my messages have been deleted. From Global/Private servers to direct messages. If they actually deleted all of my messages where even I can't access right now, I guess about 70,000 of my messages have been deleted.

Few days later after the message deletion Discord replied to me my messages have been all deleted.

Hi there,
 
Thank you for your patience.
 
Please note that the deletion process for all of the message IDs that you have provided is now complete. We appreciate your patience in this matter.
 
Regards,
Discord Privacy Team

For such serious cases like you're working in a team and one of the team members got hacked and critical DMs have started to leak, this might be the best chance to bulk delete your all messages. (Well, this is my case that I started to delete my messages) Of course, you need to find about your local laws first.

Thanks to @abigailwillow for starting this discussion and others who have posted their experiences with requests. I'll not going to share my personal Python code. Since I'm not familiar with Python, most of the code is roughly written. However I think the script that McDic has written seems much more cleaner than my script, so please check and try their script to parse your data package quickly.

Good luck!

[ASerinYellsNotCute]

Oh, and it seems like they can't delete guild member used non-ephemeral slash command messages since it's coming from bot. The message ownership is held the by bot has been used, not me.

[McDic]

As I described above, Discord said they deleted the messages to me while they ACTUALLY NOT DELETED the messages. You should double-check if your messages are deleted. Here are some good methods to try;

• Re-exporting your privacy data package and check how many of message IDs are remaining
• Ask other friends who are in servers you cannot access anymore

[ASerinYellsNotCute]

I'll try both! Before I wrote my experience here I actually told my friend to check messages that I cannot access right now. I hope Discord have deleted all of my messages.

DMs were completely deleted last time I check, contained a thousands of messages that went through years...

[ASerinYellsNotCute]

Seems like my message cannot be searched in Discord servers where I doesn't exist, so I think all of my messages were successfully deleted? We'll see.

[abigailwillow]

Not much to add to this, just funny to me to see that they're still trying to use the message context excuse. Yeah I know the message context will be lost, that's the point of my request. 🤣

[TheThinkingThinker]

I got this response: Hi there, Thank you for reaching out to us! Please be aware that in order to protect our users' privacy and security, we are only able to take actions or discuss account details with the email address associated with the specified Discord account. Additionally, we cannot delete data nor compile a data package from already deleted accounts as all of the associated data has now been anonymized. In addition to anonymization in our systems, deleted accounts are assigned a username and randomized discriminator (e.g. Deleted User#1122, Deleted User#2233). However, consistent with Discord's Privacy Policy <https://discord.com/privacy>, there are limited circumstances in which Discord might retain your information after account deletion. For more information about what happens to your account when it is deleted, check out our Support Center article HERE <https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/5431812448791-How-long-Discord-keeps-your-information> . We hope this information has been helpful. Context: I deleted my acc last year around January, found out this year my personal info is still there. Is there anything I can do or am I cooked chat?

…

On Mon, Apr 22, 2024 at 10:33 AM Serin ***@***.***> wrote: Seems like my message cannot be searched in Discord servers where I doesn't exist, so I think all of my messages were successfully deleted? We'll see. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#429 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/BF6P3TK6M6XQJVRMJ5VVVA3Y6UNTHAVCNFSM6AAAAAARXHO2MSVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43SRDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHM4TCOBZHAZDE> . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: ***@***.***>