This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, store, protect, and share your personal information through our services. If you reside in the European Economic Area (“EEA”) or United Kingdom, Discord Netherlands BV is the “data controller” of your personal information collected through the services (as defined in our Terms of Service). For everyone else, Discord Inc. is the data controller. It’s important that you read this entire policy, but here’s a summary to get you started:
We created Discord to be a platform that brings people together over shared experiences and gives everyone a place to belong. Whether you’re part of a club, gaming group, or just a handful of friends that want to spend time together, Discord makes it easy to express yourself and find community.
Our “services” has the same meaning as defined in the Terms of Service. They include the Discord app, which can be accessed on mobile, web, desktop, console, or even a connected home appliance—any device with a web browser and internet connection. We also have a website, blog, and support center, and we may collect your information through other means like surveys, emails, and social media. If we build another product, our services include that too.
As explained in our Terms of Service, we allow users to add content to the services in a number of different ways, including via direct messages and in smaller and larger spaces. If you share content within larger spaces, that content may be accessed by many people, including people you do not know. For example, some servers are available in the Server Discovery section of the app and do not require an invite link to join. Other server owners may publish their server invite link on public websites. Anyone can access these servers, and you should be aware that server owners or admins set these permissions, and like the size of a server, the permissions may change over time.
We may also use content posted in larger spaces, to help us improve and power features like Highlights Notifications, identify harmful content on the services, and enforce our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines. These things are important to us, and we believe they will make Discord even better for our users. We will always try to let you know the type of space you are in (although we don’t control where invite links are shared or the permissions for that server). You can limit the extent to which your content is used for these purposes as described in the “How to control your privacy” section below. You should take all of this into account when you are using our services, and choose the spaces, features, and settings that are most appropriate for your content.
We make money from paid subscriptions and the sale of digital (and sometimes physical) goods, not from selling your personal information to third parties.
We collect certain information when you use Discord. This includes information you provide to us, information we collect automatically, and information we receive from other sources.
We also collect information automatically from you when you use Discord. This includes:
We may receive information from cookies (small text files placed on your computer or device) and similar technologies. First-party cookies are placed by us (and our third-party service providers) and allow you to use the services and to help us analyze and improve your experience and the services. You can control cookies as described in the “How to control your privacy” section below. The services use the following types of cookies:
We may receive information about you from other sources, including from other users and third parties, and combine that information with the other information we have about you. For example, if you interact with our social media account on another platform, we may receive certain information about you like your username on that platform.
We use your information for the following purposes:
To fulfill our contract with you
For our legitimate business interests
To comply with our legal obligations
We retain and use your information in connection with potential legal claims when necessary and for compliance, regulatory, and auditing purposes. For example, we retain information where we are required by law or if we are compelled to do so by a court order or regulatory body. Also, when you exercise any of your applicable legal rights to access, amend, or delete your personal information, we may request additional information from you for the purpose of confirming your identity.
With your consent
We may also collect and use personal information with your consent, such as to send you marketing communications where legally required. You can revoke your consent at any time (mostly through our services directly), though note that you might not be able to use any service or feature that requires collection or use of that personal information.
To protect someone’s vital interests
We may collect or share personal data if we think someone’s life is in danger—for example, to help resolve an urgent medical situation.
We retain personal information until we determine it is no longer needed for the processing purposes for which we collected or retain it or for legal compliance. You can learn more about data retention periods in our data retention policy.
We take a number of steps to help protect your information. All information sent within our services is encrypted both in transit and at rest. For example, we use Transport Layer Security (“TLS”) to encrypt text and images in transit. We also enforce technical and administrative access controls to limit which of our employees and contractors have access to nonpublic personal information. You can help maintain the security of your account by configuring two-factor authentication.
We believe that users should be able to tailor their Discord experience to their preferences, including privacy. And while local laws may require different things, we believe that our users should have at least the same basic ability to shape their experience no matter where they are in the world. Here’s how you can control how we process your information, how to delete or correct certain information, and how to request access to your information. Users in certain places may have specific rights under their local laws. You can learn more about these in the relevant sections below.
Be aware of the Discord spaces you choose to participate in
You can choose what communities to participate in and what information you add to our services. You can choose what messages to send or post, who to engage with (e.g., one or more particular users or a potentially unlimited group of users), what information to include in your profile, whether to connect any third party services to your Discord account, and more. For example, if you share content in certain spaces, such as servers listed in Server Discovery or with public invite links, your content may be accessed by anyone.
Customize your personal Discord settings
We offer a number of settings that allow you to tailor your experience within Discord. Some of these relate to specific features: for example, you can choose whether to display your current activity (like the game you are playing or the music you are listening to) in your status in your User Settings page (this is the gear icon next to your username).
You can also access other privacy-specific settings in your User Settings. For example, you can decide which types of direct messages are scanned for explicit content, who can add you as a friend, and more. This is also where you can limit certain types of processing of your information:
You can learn more about these settings in our Help Center.
Disable or delete your account
You can disable or delete your account via the User Settings menu. Disabling your account stops the processing of new data, but allows you to reactivate your account without interruption to you. Deleting your account permanently deletes identifying information and anonymizes other data as described in our data retention policy. You can learn more about how to delete your account in this Help Center article and how to disable your account in this Help Center article.
Manage your content and servers
You may edit or delete specific pieces of information within the services:
Content may be retained by Discord for use as described elsewhere in this policy and in our data retention policy. Also, in limited circumstances, we may have a legal obligation to retain certain information, even if you delete the information or your account.
Access your information
If you want to see what information we have collected about you, you can request a copy of your data in the Privacy & Safety section of your User Settings. You should receive your data packet within 30 days. Data is delivered in common digital formats including CSV, JSON, and any other file format you used when uploading attachments to the services. You can learn more about how to access your information in our Help Center.
To control how information is collected and used from cookies on the services, you can take one or more of the following steps.
If you disable or remove cookies, some parts of the services may not function properly. Information may be collected to remember your opt-out preferences.
Questions or concerns about your privacy? You can email us at [email protected].
We are based in the United States, and we process and store information on servers located in the United States. We may also store information on servers and equipment in other countries depending on a variety of factors, including the locations of our users and service providers. These data transfers allow us to provide our services to you. By accessing or using our services or otherwise providing information to us, you understand that your information will be processed, transferred, and stored in the U.S. and other countries, where different data protection standards may apply and/or you may not have the same rights as you do under local law.
When transferring data outside the EEA, we use standard contract clauses (Module 1 and Module 2), and we rely on the European Commission's adequacy decisions about certain countries, as applicable, or other legally compliant mechanisms or conditions for such data transfer.
Discord and its U.S. entities/subsidiaries (Backgammon Merger Sub II, LLC, Brazos Games, LLC, Discord International, Inc, Flames Sub LLC, and Sentropy Technologies Inc.) also comply with the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Frameworks, as well as the UK Extension to the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework. If you have questions or complaints regarding our compliance with the Data Privacy Framework principles, please reach out to us at [email protected]. If we do not resolve your complaint, you may submit your complaint free of charge to JAMS. Under certain conditions specified by the Data Privacy Framework principles, you may also be able to invoke binding arbitration to resolve your complaint. We are subject to the investigatory and enforcement powers of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. In certain circumstances, we may be liable for the transfer of personal data from the EU, Switzerland, or the UK to a third party outside those countries.
For more information about the Data Privacy Framework principles and to view our certification, please visit the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Data Privacy Framework site.
We allow third party developers to build certain features or other services and offer them within the Discord services. For example, server administrators can add “bots” created by third party developers that provide features like content moderation and interactive games. Similarly, you may have access to games or activities built by third parties within the services.
These third-party services need to follow all policies that apply to them (including often our Developer Terms of Service and Developer Policy). As part of these policies, we require developers to have a privacy policy that makes clear what they do with your information. Please review these privacy policies, as they describe what bots and apps may do with your information. We also require that certain popular bots apply for access to certain data. But because these services are operated by third parties, we don’t control them or what information they collect. It’s up to you whether to participate in a server that uses bots, and whether to engage with third-party services in general.
You can contact Discord Netherlands BV’s Data Protection Officer at [email protected].
We’ve appointed VeraSafe as Discord’s representative in the United Kingdom for data protection matters, pursuant to Article 27 of the UK General Data Protection Regulation. See the section “Contact Us” below. You can contact VeraSafe only on matters related to the processing of personal data.
Certain local laws, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Brazil’s Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados (LGPD), require services to provide information about the information they collect, how they use it, and the lawful basis for processing it. We’ve described most of that already in the earlier portions of this Policy.
Exercising your rights: As described in the “How to control your privacy” section above, all our users have control over their information and can directly edit or delete information from their account and limit what data we process. If you are located in certain regions, including the European Union, you may have additional rights that you can exercise through the Discord app directly or by contacting us:
If you have any questions about these rights or wish to exercise control over your information, please reach out to [email protected].
Exercising your rights: As described in the “How to control your privacy” section above, all our users have control over their information and can directly edit or delete information from their account and limit what data we process. If you are a resident of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, or Virginia, you may have additional rights that you (or, in certain states, an authorized agent acting on your behalf) can exercise through the Discord app directly (as described above) or by contacting us, including the right to:
You also have the right to not be discriminated against for exercising your rights. You may also have the right to opt out of “sales” of your information and “sharing/processing of your information for targeted advertising.” We do not sell the personal data of our users or share personal data for targeted advertising purposes.
Certain information may be exempt from the requests above under applicable law. For example, we need to retain certain information in order to provide our services to you. We also need to take reasonable steps to verify your identity before responding to a request. If you are an authorized agent submitting a request on a user’s behalf (where permitted), we may require proof of your written authorization before processing the request. Depending on applicable law, you may have the right to appeal our decision to deny your request.
If you have any questions about these rights, wish to exercise them, or request an appeal, please reach out to us at [email protected].
In addition to the rights described above, consumers residing in California are afforded the right to certain additional information with respect to their personal information under the California Consumer Privacy Act or (“CCPA”). If you are a California resident, this section applies to you.
Our collection and use of personal information: We collect the following categories of personal information: identifiers (such as your username, the email address you used to sign up, and your phone number if you’ve chosen to provide it); commercial information (a record of what you’ve bought from Discord, if anything); financial data (payment information and your history of purchases from Discord); internet or other network information (how you interact with the application); location information (because your IP address may indicate your general location); inference data about you (for example, what content you may be interested in); and other information that identifies or can be reasonably associated with you. For more information about what we collect and the sources of such collection, please see the “The information we collect” section above. To the extent we collect or use sensitive personal information as defined by law (such as the CCPA), we do so in accordance with applicable legal requirements, and we do not use or disclose it other than for purposes for which there is not a right to limit under the CCPA.
We collect personal information for the business and commercial purposes described in “How we use your information” above.
Disclosure of personal information: We may share your personal information with third parties as described in the “How we disclose your information” section above. We disclose the categories of personal information mentioned above for business or commercial purposes.
No sale or “share” of personal information: The CCPA sets forth certain obligations for businesses that sell or “share” personal information. We do not sell or share the personal information of our users as defined in the CCPA. We do disclose certain information as outlined in the “How we disclose your information” section above and you can make choices with respect to your information as outlined in this policy.
We retain personal information as described in the “Data retention” section above and in our data retention policy.
Requests received: please see this page for information on the number of data requests we have received.
California’s “Shine the Light” law gives residents of California the right under certain circumstances to request information from us regarding the manner in which we share certain categories of personal information (as defined in the Shine the Light law) with third parties, as defined under applicable law, for their direct marketing purposes. We do not share your personal information with third-parties for their own direct marketing purposes.
We will update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We always indicate the date the last changes were published, and if changes are significant, we’ll provide a more prominent notice as required by law, such as by emailing you or highlighting the changes within the services.
Email us at [email protected] with any questions about this Privacy Policy or how we process your information. We’ll be happy to help.
To contact Discord’s Data Protection Officer, please email [email protected].
You can also reach us by mail if you want. If you reside in the EEA or United Kingdom, you can contact us at:
Discord Netherlands BV
ATTN: Privacy Policy
Schiphol Boulevard 195 1118BG
Schiphol, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
If you reside anywhere else, you can contact us at:
Discord Inc.
ATTN: Privacy Policy
444 De Haro Street #200
San Francisco, CA 94107, USA.
If you reside in the United Kingdom, you can also contact VeraSafe, Discord’s appointed representative for data protection matters related to the processing of personal data, using this contact form: https://verasafe.com/public-resources/contact-data-protection-representative or via telephone at +420 228 881 031. VeraSafe’s mailing address is:
VeraSafe United Kingdom Ltd.
37 Albert Embankment
London SE1 7TL United Kingdom