Staying Safe on Discord
Just because the app you are using itself isnt malware, does not mean that you are completely safe. Lets take a look at Discord for example. In the online world of video games, Discord has become the go to for calling friends, group texts, and even watching movies together.
This app has been a great way for me to stay in touch with my friends and family for the past 10 years. However over those 10 years I have noticed that this platform can be used against you if you are not careful.
Just like facebook or twitter, communities form and make their own groups called servers. Sometimes these are official servers, sometimes they are fanmade. In these servers people can see everything about your profile if you don't have your settings set up correctly. And there will be scammers and hackers who will try to send you messages after seeing your profile in a random discord. As with the case with everything online, do not accept messages or friend requests from people you do not know. Especially do not click on any links sent to you. They will try and scare you into clicking links, or say they need your help. Do not respond. Before you do anything. Research to see if there is a new spam or hacking attempt going around. If an account of yours did get hacked, do not take the word from a stranger, contact the platform and set new passwords for your accounts.
Some people will reach out and act friendly, or even pose as a member of the opposite gender in order to coax you into talking to them and giving up your personal information. It is best to constantly ignore and refuse any messages, friend requests, and and invites from people you do not know.
For discord we can actually set up privacy to help prevent people from reaching out to you randomly. There are two categories under settings that you will want to navigate to. Data & Privacy, and Content & Social.
Let's start with Content & Social. In this tab you will want to make sure you cant see any kind of mature sexual media by setting the settings to block, this will outright prevent people from sending it to you, and you won't ever see them posted in public servers. The same applies to the Graphic Media settings just below it.
As you scroll down the page you will see settings for filtering spam, set it to your desired level but I recommend setting it to “Filter all”. This is to help protect your account in case a friend of yours gets hacked and starts sending you spam.
Below this is the most important setting, Social Permissions. Here you can set it up to block direct messages from people even if they are on the same server as you unless they are your friends, this will help reduce spam. You may leave or turn off message requests if you feel like you want to manually filter through the messages. Below that is the Friend Requests section which you can set up to prevent people from sending you friend requests. I also recommend turning this off so you don't get spammed by people you don't know. You can always send a person a friend request even if you have set it up to where you cant get friend requests.
The next section is the Data & Privacy tab under Settings. This one is simple, in the Data section turn off all data collection. Turn off allowing your voice to be recorded in Clips. Below this section is the Profile Privacy section. Select Friends only.
Following these guides will help keep you and your data safe while you use discord. And remember while these settings help, the best thing to use is common sense and never give out info publicly.
