The amount of "tech people" that weren't using any sort of ad blocking was astounding. When I was doing IT stuff I figured it was just normie endusers barely undrestanding how shit worked but god damn, it was rather appalling.

My main professor in college pronounced "kernel" as "Curr-nell". Our computer lab mentor, who I basically carried through her first 2 years, insisted that URL was pronounced like the name "Earl" with a Y on the front of it. I applied for that job when she did and never even got an interview.

Looking back on the girl that had no business being in a programming degree not understanding how to properly format HTML/XML, not so bad compared to some of the dumb shit I witnessed.

I was gonna say 95% lol.

One person I sat next to in intro to web dev almost ripped my USB drive out of my computer to save something with barely even asking and I lost my shit over it because I had a modified hacked version of Portal 1 on it that didn't need the Steam runtime so I could play it on the school computers. In hindsight that was probably on me since I really don't think she had any business understanding what I was actually doing. I mentioned a few other horror stories in my reply to @RyanGosling@hexbear.net's comment if you wanna cringe a bit lol.

FERPA

For students we do actually, except we put it on school districts and teachers to self enforce under penalty of being directly held liable for data breaches.

I work in school IT so I'm very familiar with the requirements (of my state anyway).

The system we have is fucked. Teachers (highly tech illiterate) have to use services that have signed our states privacy pledge, if they use a service that has not signed the pledge, and there is a data breach, they can be held directly liable.

The pledge states that the service shouldn't store any PII on students, but there is no way for the state to verify this. I know first had that every software we have has PII of students (names for example). I doubt these services are storing encrypted display names for example. However a common naming convention for accounts in schools is to use parts of the students name. No idea of these services would store encrypted usernames or emails either. Failure to "follow the rules" might see the corporation sued by the state but again, never legally tested. This was all born out of a multistate lawsuit against Google because they were caught scraping student email account contents for targeted ads when they said they didn't. In my district were moving forward with a new naming convention for students that is simply a random number to cut down on PII.

Anyway, the district is under no direct threat from the law, but does "require" it to list all the software they use. This requirement has no penalty for noncompliance.

None of this has been legally tested yet. The threat to teachers is high though (loss of license I think), so we try really hard to keep them informed and in compliance with the law.

It can if you just believe hard enough.

yep, they're still making new changes to try to compete with discord, it's just that nobody cares

Use something like Vesktop or Goofcord. They're wrappers for the web version with extra features and telemetry blocked/removed. As private as you'rd going to get with Discord.

i am not a big discord-head but its my assumption that there's still pretty close parity between the web browser version and the linux package, so i personally don't have a reason to install it.

actually answer your q, no sorry i have zero well-formed reasons why you shouldn't install it, i just feel less icky loading it from browser instead of having it installed on my system. same for skype

In my experience, the ones bundled in distros work okay, but tend to eventually fall behind and stop working.

If you download the .deb from their website, it works well but sometimes, on startup, makes you download and install new one. I assume the .tar.gz version from their website works the same, but with replacing the folder manually.