Discord steps up privacy for users with end-to-end encryption

Discord has faced its share of controversies. Just this year, it came to light that 600 million Discord users had their data leaked after someone scraped group chats across thousands of servers. And earlier this month, Discord released a new feature that felt like spying.

Fortunately, there’s a tiny bit of good news to balance that out: the gaming-focused communication platform is now rolling out end-to-end encryption for audio and video calls.

In the announcement post, the company refers to it as the DAVE protocol — short for Discord’s Audio and Video End-to-End Encryption — and it will be implemented across all audio and video calls in direct messages, group chats, voice channels, and Go Live streams.

What this means is that call data is encrypted on your end before it’s sent to receivers, and then decrypted by receivers. Only the participants in a call know the per-sender keys needed for decryption — not even Discord knows, which means the content of your audio and video calls will now be shielded from Discord itself once the rollout completes. Discord claims that the encryption process will not affect call quality.

For an in-depth breakdown of how it all works, check out the post. Or you can dig even deeper into Discord’s whitepaper on the DAVE protocol as well as the open-source library behind the DAVE protocol.

Note that this only affects audio and video calls. Text messages are not encrypted in order to facilitate content moderation rules.

The DAVE update is currently available on Discord’s desktop and mobile apps, and it will roll out to other clients in 2025. This end-to-end encryption brings Discord more in line with other communication platforms, like WhatsApp and Signal, that have been using end-to-end encryption for several years now.

Further reading: How to close your Discord direct messages properly (and keep weirdos out)