Discord’s new feature feels a lot like spying. Here’s how to disable it

Discord started off as just a chatroom with voice chat features, but it has since grown into the de facto communication and community building tool for gamers, games, and organizations. The company has made plenty of missteps since Discord first debuted almost a decade ago, with some more egregious than others.

Here’s one recent change that some gamers may find unpleasant: As of September, your list of Discord contacts will no longer just show what games your friends are playing, but also how long they’ve been playing each game and how often they’ve played in the last 30 days.

Related: The beginner’s guide to using Discord

The overview might show, for example, that one of your contacts has been playing Call of Duty for 13 days in a row while another contact has been playing World of Warcraft for over 100 hours, which is then advertised with a marathon badge.

You can also react directly to individual in-game time displays or activities using emojis on the tiles displayed for your Discord friends. More noteworthy is that you can review any contact’s activities over the last 30 days, even when they’re offline.

And that’s precisely the problem. Not everyone wants their Discord contacts to be able to see, for example, that they played Counter-Strike three days ago. It might sound benign and not something worth hiding, but that’s beside the point.

Suppose you cancelled a meetup with friends because you just want to play solo for a while. This would make it extremely easy for someone to see that you’re playing alone, thus opening the floodgates for confrontations or hurt feelings.

Or maybe you don’t want your friends to know that you have beta access to an unreleased game. Or maybe you’re playing a lewd game that you don’t want others to know you’re playing. The reasons are almost endless.

How to disable the new feature

Fortunately, the developers of Discord haven’t made this feature mandatory, allowing you to deactivate the feature if you don’t want your activities to be tracked and recorded.

Go to Settings and navigate to the Privacy and security section. Here, you can deactivate the feature under Activity status.