Discord's experimental new Clips feature, which has been rolling out for the past year, allows users streaming on voice channels to fit their streams into clips of two minutes or less. This is a minor addition, but coincidentally mildly controversial.

The fear is privacy. On social media, some posters are alarmed by the fact that Clips is a feature that records the voices of other users on channels other than streamers, and are urging their followers to opt out in their Discord settings. Several Facebook posts I have seen declare that Discord is recording your voice without your knowledge, and one person says he cannot think of a legitimate use for this feature.

In fact, Discord clearly notifies users in the voice channel as soon as someone with Clips enabled starts streaming. While one could argue that it is better to choose to have one's voice included in Clips than not to have one's voice included in Clips, it is hard to say that a particular tweet or Facebook chain post is a shocking invasion of privacy.

There would actually be more privacy if all friends agreed to use only Discord's Clips feature rather than other screen capture software. If someone on the voice channel starts recording desktop audio using Nvidia Shadowplay or OBS, there is no notification, no way to opt out like with Clips (although there is an option not to talk), if you've been using Discord long enough and in a large enough group, You may have had the experience of realizing that someone was live-streaming your conversation all along without you noticing.

The same thing can happen on Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, or even the phone if someone uses a phone; the privacy concerns that fuel this concern about Discord's new feature are real, and while the Internet is an unpleasant place, Discord is not letting anything malicious is not creeping in; while certain games like Overwatch 2 with built-in voice chat record what is said for moderation purposes, Discord has stated that it does not record and archive voice chats.

If you don't want their Discord highlight reel to hear the strange words you happen to say when a friend performs a sick move, there is an option to omit your voice from Clips at the bottom of the Clips tab in the Discord user settings .

Just be careful not to get a false sense of security. Even if you opt out of Clips, your voice could still be captured using traditional clip saving methods (Alt+Z on Nvidia-equipped PCs) or streamed by friends who are hiding the fact that they are Twitch stars.