Discord's experimental new Clips feature, which has been rolling out since last year, lets users who are streaming in a voice channel capture up to two-minute-long clips of their streams. It's a nice little feature addition that has accidentally become mildly controversial.
The fear is privacy. On social media, some posters have sounded the alarm over Clips' ability to record the voices of the other users in a channel aside from the streamer, urging their followers to opt out in Discord's settings—there's a toggle which omits your voice from Clips. Multiple Facebook posts I've seen declare that Discord now records your voice without your knowledge, and one said they couldn't think of any legitimate use for the feature.
Actually, Discord clearly notifies the users in a voice channel as soon as someone with Clips enabled starts streaming. An argument can be made that it'd be better if we opted in to our voices being included in Clips rather than out, but it's hardly the shocking breach of privacy certain tweets and Facebook chain posts are making it out to be.
We'd actually have more privacy if all our friends agreed to exclusively use Discord's Clips feature instead of other screen capture software. There is no notification if someone in a voice channel starts recording their desktop audio with Nvidia Shadowplay or OBS, and no way to opt out like you can with Clips (except by not talking, which is always an option). If you've used Discord long enough and with a big enough group, you may have already had the experience of discovering that someone's been livestreaming your whole conversation without you realizing it.
The same thing can happen on Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, or the telephone, if anyone uses phones anymore. The
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