Discord, one of the world's largest group chat apps, announced on Tuesday that voice and video calls within the platform will now be end-to-end encrypted (E2EE), meaning that not even Discord can see what users are talking about during a conversation.
Over the past decade, end-to-end encrypted chat has gone from being a rare exception (think Skype in the mid-2000s) to the technology used in the world's most popular chat apps, including iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, and Facebook Messenger. Discord began life as a group chat platform for gamers, with a focus on voice calling for users playing online games together, but it also became popular among people simply looking for a place where large numbers of people could interact.
Discord, which boasts 200 million monthly users, said last year that it was working to bring end-to-end encryption to its platform, starting with voice and video calls, and said that millions of people are calling on Discord “at any given time.” Now the company is rolling out the technology.
“Today we're starting to move audio and video for DMs, group DMs, voice channels, and Go Live streams to E2EE. We'll be able to tell if a call is end-to-end encrypted, as well as provide verification of other members on the call,” Stephen Birarda, Discord staff software engineer for audio/video infrastructure, wrote in a blog post announcing the rollout and providing technical details about the technology Discord is implementing.
Meanwhile, Bilarda said private messages are not end-to-end encrypted.
“Safety is inextricably linked to our products and policies. While audio and video are end-to-end encrypted, messages on Discord continue to follow our content moderation approach and are not end-to-end encrypted,” Bilarda wrote.
Discord spokesperson Kerryn Sloan told TechCrunch that the company has “no current plans for the future” to roll out encryption to other areas, such as direct messages or group chats.
Bilarda announced that the company will publish a paper on its encryption protocol, which has been reviewed by cybersecurity consulting firm Trail of Bits and the code has been open-sourced.