That’s probably a good start.
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This is surprising. Never expected in a million years for them to do this, but this is probably due to the controversy about Discord privacy policy, allowing them to listen to everything you say in a voice call.
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In my eyes, Discord was already a million times better than Matrix when it comes to communities, but now it’s even better, great.
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Discord still doesn’t encrypt messages, and own them.
It’s also closed source.
Matrix might be a worse experience, but it is clearly supperior in Privacy&Freedom.
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This is pretty funny. Suddenly they care about privacy? lol. Either way it’s not open source so it’s not verifiable. It may have some backdoor for “protecting the children”.
Presumably they are adding it so they can get rid of the burden that comes with being the anti-privacy spying tyrants they’ve been in the past, and by proxy, get rid of a tons of possible legal repercussions, and also so they can field off any fed requests for voice call data beyond some metadata.
At least, among the popular ones, it’s much better then any other social medias. Props to them.
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I suspect it’s so they can actually claim to not know about bad shit happening on their servers. It’s legally better for them IMO, and everyone benefits.
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Exactly
I hate to defend Discord of all companies, but they literally released a whitepaper, open sourced the crypto library their clients use with an MIT license, and got it audited too for good measure
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Good news for the masses, similar to Twitter having encrypted DMs. It’s one less thing for these bigcorpos to prey on their users with.
But non-news for privacy advocates in my opinion, as was the case with Twitter DMs. Regardless of why they implemented this, whether it was for legal deniability or for actually wanting to be less evil, I won’t care to use it or support it in any way. Complete non-news to me. I’m happy for the folks that use it, though.
I commend this, and would be interested in seeing how these libs stand up against others actually, but unless the client itself is open and reproducible, then it really doesn’t matter in the long run
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I’m sure there are individuals at Discord who want the increase protections for the user benefits. But corporations often act in the hive mind towards money and branding. There is 0% chance they did it for funs, it’s alway for moving their product forward.
The more we expect of these companies to have these protections, and the more we push legally, the more they will do them.
To support our long-term privacy goals, we will only support E2EE calls starting on March 1st, 2026 for all audio and video conversations in direct messages (DMs), group messages (GDMs), voice channels, and Go Live streams on Discord.
They also underwent a security audit by Trail of Bits.
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Disappointing to see their encryption library written in memory unsafe C++
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Has Discord said whether they’re planning to eventually encrypt conversations (messages) as well?
I don’t think so. I’d be okay with just encrypted DMs, let alone messages in other servers.
I think public servers are … well, public. Like this forum. But I’m a part of several servers with 10-20 people on them - groups of friends or groups of people on a project - that I would very much like to be E2EE. They have an article for setting up a “private server” (and they literally have it in quotes, just like that). But I’d like to see an official toggle to make a server private, which can have some functional limitations (things that would make it hard to E2EE and just to distinguish it from massive public servers) - but would enable true E2EE.
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They should open source the client if they have “nothing to hide.” All the privacy, security claims and audits aren’t worth anything if you can’t build the software yourself. You have no guarantee whatsoever that the version you are running has been built from the source that has been audited.
And at the end of the day, Discord is still a proprietary, centralized system with all the problems associated with such services.
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Nope. Here’s what Discord said in the article:
While audio and video will be end-to-end encrypted, messages on Discord will continue to follow our content moderation approach and are not end-to-end encrypted.
Thanks, I missed that.
But I still hope they some day offer a special E2EE “private server” even if it has restrictions on number of people and removes features that are meant for massive servers.
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