Discord, one of the largest group chat apps in the world, announced on Tuesday that audio and video calls inside the platform will now be end-to-end encrypted (E2EE), meaning even Discord won’t know what users in those conversations talk about.
In the last 10 years, end-to-end encrypted chat went from being a rare exception — think Skype in the mid-2000s — to a technology used by the world’s most popular chat apps, such as iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, and Facebook Messenger, among others. Discord was born as a group chat platform for gamers, with an emphasis on audio calls for users playing online games together, but also became popular with people who simply want a place where a large number of people can interact.
Discord, which claims to have 200 million monthly users, announced last year that it was working on bringing end-to-end encryption to its platform, starting with audio and video calls, saying that “at any given moment” millions of people are talking via calls on Discord. Now, the company is rolling out the technology.
“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,” Stephen Birarda, Discord’s staff software engineer on audio/video infrastructure, wrote in a blog post announcing the rollout, as well as explaining technical details of the technology Discord is implementing.
Birarda said that private messages, on the other hand, will not be end-to-end encrypted.
“Safety is intertwined with our product and policies. 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,” wrote Birarda.
Discord spokesperson Kellyn Slone told TechCrunch that the company has “no further plans at this time” to roll out encryption in other areas, such as direct messages or group chats.
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Birarda announced that the company is releasing a paper about its encryption protocol, which he said was reviewed by the cybersecurity consulting firm Trail of Bits, as well as open sourcing the code.
