PrivacyDiscord
Discord is rolling out web pages for its big public servers, and from mid-December messages posted in them could show up in search engine results — findable by people with no Discord account. The good news: in the UK it’s off by default, and under-18s can’t switch it on at all, so for now your messages shouldn’t be indexed. It only touches large public ‘Discoverable’ servers, not private ones or DMs.
The move
Treat a big public server like a noticeboard: anyone can join and read it, so don’t post anything there you wouldn’t want a stranger to find, whatever your settings say.
For teachers
Talking about this in class
A quick way in: ask the class what the difference is between a message that stays inside an app and one a stranger could find by Googling the topic you were chatting about. Most assume anything posted in a chat is only seen by the people in that chat — this story is a neat example of a platform setting quietly changing where your words can travel.
The habit to land is that ‘public’ can mean more public than you think. A good discussion point: the switch here only affects future messages, so the safest move is deciding what’s fine to post before you post it. Deleting still helps afterwards: it takes a message off Discord and its web pages, though a search engine can keep showing an old copy for a while. Worth noting the reassuring UK detail too — off by default, and under-18s can’t enable it — so this is about building the instinct, not panicking.
For a no-prep starter, get students to sort a few imaginary posts (a username, a school name, a weekend plan, a favourite game) into ‘fine if a stranger found it’ and ‘not fine’, then talk through why.