Discord has reportedly joined the other behemoth social media to tweak the functionality of integrating end-to-end encryption (E2EE) with other in-app features to match the standard of its social policy. The group chat-focused app announcement about the upgrade revealed that the E2EE technology currently features in-app voice and video calls.
Discord’s E2EE technology ensures secure communication between users. E2EE is a method of secure communication where only the sender and recipient can read the messages. Encryption occurs on the sender’s device, and decryption happens on the recipient’s device.
Discord’s staff software engineer on audio/video infrastructure, Stephen Birarda, published the report via the in-house official website where he further discussed the need for tweaking its privacy system to prevent prying eyes from eavesdropping on its users’ conversations.
“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.”
Birarda’s egocentric aura was depicted in his announcement about upgrading Discord’s voice and video call feature that’s powered by E2EE technology. For context, the newly integrated E2EE technology with the in-app calls connotes that the social media developers cannot access users’ ongoing conversations either by video or voice calls.
Since the tweaked E2EE technology in Discord features restrictions from the in-house developers from eavesdropping on users’ calls, third parties have no chance to breach the group chat-focused media encryption firewall without triggering the built-in fail-safe security system to strengthen the E2EE technology.
According to Discord’s staff software engineer on audio/video infrastructure developer’s report that shared the glory with the rest of the team of developers that communed effort in accomplishing the tweaked project. This meant a big deal for the group chat-focused media because its entire in-app features such as “direct messages, group chats, channels, videos, and voice calls are currently E2EE protected.
However, Birarda quoted a little twitch per updating the E2EE tech in-app on the group chat media and how it is being substituted. Since Discord has a comprehensive approach to moderating users’ verbal interaction, then the direct message will no longer feature E2EE which is made exclusively reserved for voice and video calls.
“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,” Birarda reports.
Discord uses the Signal Protocol for E2EE, developed by Open Whisper Systems. E2EE was enabled for Direct Messages (DMs) and Group DMs (up to 10 users). Henceforth, Discord’s Voice and video calls only utilize this encryption technology.