X vs Discord

Posting gives X a worldwide, royalty-free license to use, copy, modify, publish, distribute, and display your content in any media. This is much broader than what is strictly needed just to host your posts.

X expressly says it can analyze your content and use it to improve services, including training machine learning and AI models. Users who post may therefore help train AI systems without additional payment.

X collects the contents of Direct Messages, along with recipients, timestamps, and metadata for encrypted messages. Users should not assume ordinary messaging on the service is private from the platform.

X can let other companies, organizations, or individuals use or redistribute your content, including syndication, broadcast, and publication on other media and services. That expands downstream use beyond the platform itself.

X states you will not be paid for its use of your content or for others' licensed uses. The terms treat your ability to use the service as sufficient compensation.

X says it may collect log information even if you do not have an account or are signed out, including pages visited, search terms, ads shown, and cookie identifiers. That means tracking can extend beyond active account use.

X may associate your account with browsers, devices, email addresses, phone numbers, and signed-out identifiers to infer identity. This can make it harder to stay compartmentalized across devices or sessions.

X collects information about your interactions with ads served on X and off X, including views, clicks, and video engagement. This supports ad profiling based on behavior across contexts.

X automatically collects approximate location and can collect precise location if you enable it. Location data can be sensitive, especially when combined with activity and ad profiles.

X says you still own the content you create and post. That is better than an ownership transfer, though it is paired with a very broad license back to X.

If you use features that limit distribution to a restricted community, X says it will respect that choice. This is a useful transparency point, though it does not undo the broad underlying license.

U.S. and Canada users generally must resolve disputes through individual arbitration, not court, and waive jury trials and class actions. This can make it harder and sometimes more expensive to pursue claims.

If Discord harms you, its financial responsibility is heavily limited to the greater of what you paid in the prior three months or $100. That can sharply reduce practical remedies for outages, data loss, or other service issues.

You may have to cover Discord’s legal costs and liabilities for claims related to your use, content, violations, or misconduct. This shifts significant risk onto users, especially creators or server operators.

Discord expressly says it does not sell personal information and says its business is funded by subscriptions, paid products, and sponsored content instead. That is a meaningful privacy-positive commitment.

Users can disable or delete their account from settings, and Discord says deletion permanently removes identifying information and anonymizes other data. This gives users a clear exit path, though some retention exceptions remain.

You can request a copy of your data in settings, and Discord says it provides the data in common digital formats such as JSON. This supports transparency and portability if you want to review or move your information.

You keep ownership of what you post, but Discord gets a worldwide, transferable, sublicensable license to use and adapt it for operating and improving the service. That is common, but still a broad grant users should understand.

Discord collects account details, messages and uploads, device and usage data, purchase data, and information from advertisers and other third parties. This supports personalization, safety, analytics, and advertising of Discord itself.

Public or widely available content and some reported material may be used to build automated safety and moderation systems. Users should know their content may help train detection systems, not just be displayed to recipients.

Discord can suspend or terminate accounts for violations, legal demands, safety concerns, risk to others, or even over two years of inactivity. It may do so with or without notice, subject to law.

Discord offers settings to limit personalization and some data use for service improvement, plus controls for visibility and safety features. These controls do not eliminate collection entirely, but they give users meaningful choices.

Discord says it will date updates and provide more prominent notice when privacy-policy changes are significant, such as email or in-app highlighting where required. This is better than silent policy changes.