If you rely on Discord to talk with friends or coordinate with teammates during gaming sessions, your daily conversations just got much more private. The popular messaging platform recently finished rolling out end-to-end encryption for all voice and video calls across its entire network. This major security upgrade means nobody outside of your specific chat can listen in or view your camera feed, not even the people running Discord itself.
Discord activates default encryption for voice and video calls everywhere
The new privacy measure is powered by a custom security protocol called DAVE. Discord spent years building this system so it could protect calls taking place on many different gadgets at the same time. You could have one person chatting on a laptop, another on a smartphone, and someone else joining from an Xbox or PlayStation. Now, every single one of those connections is encrypted by default without you needing to press any buttons or tweak any settings.
This encryption currently applies to all personal voice and video chats, direct messages, group messages, and Go Live streams. However, there are two main exceptions to keep in mind. The new privacy shield does not cover Stage channels since those are designed for broadcasting to very large public audiences.
The company also confirmed it has no plans to bring this same level of encryption to standard text messages. Rebuilding the text side of the app to handle end-to-end encryption is a massive technical challenge, so your written messages will stay on the current system.
To finalize this project, Discord is currently removing the old code that allowed calls to fall back to an unencrypted state. Once that step is done, every private audio and video session on the platform will be securely locked down from start to finish. You can now jump into a call knowing your casual hangouts and private strategy sessions are truly between you and your friends.
