GoKawiilDiscord is now using end-to-end encryption for all voice and video calls across all platforms: desktop, mobile, web and console.
It’s been a very long time coming – the company first shared its privacy plans back in 2023 and began the migration process a year later …
The company said in the summer of 2023 that it was experimenting with end-to-end encryption but faced challenges due to the need to introduce this without impacting latency or quality degradation in a service relying on a great many servers.
It was a little more than a year later when the company announced the protocol it would be using and began a gradual migration process. That migration is now complete across all of Discord’s platforms.
End-to-end Encryption is now standard for every voice and video call on Discord, outside of stage channels. No opt-in required. The thing that makes Discord’s voice and video infrastructure unusual isn’t just scale — it’s diversity. A single Discord call can have someone on a laptop, someone on their phone, someone on a PlayStation, someone on an Xbox, and someone in a web browser, all in the same conversation at the same time. Every one of those participants expects Discord’s high-quality, low-latency communications, regardless of what device they’re on. Building an E2EE protocol that works seamlessly across all of those surfaces simultaneously is, to my knowledge, unlike anything else that’s been shipped. DAVE is likely one of the internet’s most platform-diverse E2EE voice and video implementations.
The company has had to include a “by default” rider because at the moment there is still older code out there that would allow fallback to unencrypted messaging. The final step is removing that code.
To complete that migration, we required all clients to support DAVE before joining a call. We are now in the process of removing the client code that supports unencrypted fallback. After that is done, it will not be possible to fall back to unencrypted connections.
Discord says Stage channels are also an exception because they’re not personal conversations but rather broadcasts to larger audiences.