Discord has come under fire countless times in recent history, with the latest being the platform’s age-rating requirements and automatic profiling based on your user activity. While it sounds great on paper, the feature also comes with numerous security and privacy concerns given the platform’s not-too-distant data breaches and mass ban waves.
While users have had to push through these continued issues up until now, Discord is planning on adding a new feature that would potentially allow for your messages within servers to appear in online, displaying them for all to see regardless of whether they’re even on the platform or not.
Discord Is Getting Yet Another Controversial Feature
As shared by Dexerto on X, the new update has been raising fears among users of the platform over specifically making “public server messages searchable on Google.” To make matters worse, the setting will be enabled by default for all users in the US, meaning you’ll have to manually opt out of the new collection program to prevent your messages from showing up online.
Despite the immense concern caused by the announcement that has already been flooded with negative reactions, Discord themselves responded to the post by saying the new data collection is “more limited than the post implies.”
According to Discord, the messages only appear for some discoverable servers that have already been made public, meaning that all your “private servers, community servers, DMs, group DMs, and private or role-restricted channels” won’t be affected by the new feature. On top of this, usernames and avatars won’t be displayed either, with the text itself being displayed entirely separately for viewing purposes only, rather than identification.
Thankfully, This Is One Setting You Can Disable
While the official response certainly helps alleviate some worries about what information is being collected and how it will be used, if you’re still uncomfortable using the platform with the setting enabled, you can simply head over to the Data and Privacy settings of your Discord client to disable the feature entirely.
In terms of why Discord even included the feature in the first place, the official response is that “useful information that usedf to be findable on the web had gotten hard to track down,” as more and more communities and projects exclusively rely on Discord rather than public forums.
While you might have even experienced this yourself if you’ve tried to download user-made apps or have experience in the modding community, hopefully this feature will have some benefits rather than just being another piece of data we’ll have to worry about getting stolen.
