Discord is finally making your calls and videos a lot more secure

Hundreds of thousands of people rely on Discord to talk to one another, but not everyone knows that the popular messaging app does not use end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to keep their data safe. This level of encryption is popular among messaging apps to stop prying eyes from reading your messages, but Discord didn’t seem too pressed to add encoding to your media. Now, the company has finally added encryption to calls and videos, meaning that all of those late-night rambles over voice with your friends are now safe from malicious agents.

Discord finally adds end-to-end encryption to calls and video

As announced on the Discord blog, the company is calling this new development “Discord Audio and Video End-to-End Encryption,” or DAVE for short. Turns out, the company didn’t go for half-measures when deciding what audio and video features to encrypt:

Today, we’ll start migrating voice and video in DMs, Group DMs, voice channels, and Go Live streams to use E2EE. You will be able to confirm when calls are end-to-end encrypted and perform verification of other members in those calls.

EE2E is especially useful for end-users because it allows them to open an encrypted channel between themselves and the people they’re talking to. Because the encryption key is only shared between recipients of the message or video, nobody can pry into what’s being said – not even the company hosting the service.

We’ve seen apps like WhatsApp and Google Messages take the leap into an E2EE-powered service, and it’s good to see that Discord has finally picked up some of the slack.

Unfortunately, DAVE does not encrypt your text messages. If you’d rather not people peeking into your private project management server or your Google Drive replacement server, it’s best to do so on a secure network.