Allow Contacts To Find Me (Mobile) Cannot Opt Out

Timothy Garis
  • Edited

On the new mobile update (I don't see an obvious way to get a version number so … phone info: android 14, pixel 6), there's no way to opt out of the (automatically set) “Allow contacts to add me”.

Go under DMs.  New Message.  Add a friend.  Uncheck “Allow contacts to add me”.  Close discord, re-open.  Box is still checked.  

I'm ASSUMING that denying access to contacts list prevents this behavior but it's definitely startling to see.

11

Comments

4 comments

Date Votes
  • NekiCoule

    I believe it's because as long as you don't follow the steps, you're not opt-in yet. You have to confirm your phone number to have suggestions from your contacts, and I believe as long as you don't follow through all the steps, they can't find you yet. That box is useless for now and is only making people freak out.

    1
  • humulos

    Neki is correct. People are freaking out about nothing, it's physically impossible for this feature to be enabled by default due to how privacy settings on phones work. You're just looking at the option to enable it. 

    -1
  • Valoriie

    It is good to have a healthy respect for rare cases when creating new features. Take the hypothetical of someone who gave Discord their phone number and permission to access contacts previously without thinking much of it. 

    While this is very bad privacy practice, it is possible that users made this choice under the (at the time) reasonable assumption that contacts could not access their profile on discord, since that feature did not exist yet. Now that the feature does exist, anyone in this edge case would be open to this very niche kind of privacy risk.

    Especially when the fix here is relatively simple (have the system opt-in on Discord's end too) and wouldn't affect functionality.

    0
  • humulos

    The system is still opt-in regardless, Discord is not automatically enabling this feature for anyone. What people see is just a prompt, that checkbox being checked changes nothing on its own. if you actually look inside your settings you will see the the relevant option is not enabled by default. 

    0

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