How to hide what I'm playing from Discord?

Question

I have Discord installed and set the Activity Privacy to this:

Whenever I play a certain game, I get this notification in my settings:

In the Registered games section, I have found the game I play and though I set it to not display, it is still visible.

After quitting the game, I removed it from the Registered games with the red X.

Strangely, I can't remove it while playing.

After starting the game, I see the notification again.

What else can I do to stop Discord showing my currently played game within the client?

Answer 1

Use discord in the browser

Unfortulately, Discord does not provide any built-in option to do that. However, if you use the browser version, Discord will be confined to your browser's sandbox and won't be able to scan your computer for running apps, and most¹ other features should work properly.

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@aphid's answer is generally correct, although as is now, the most convenient solution is hidden among many suggestions which are possible for power users, but overkill for most Discord users (deploying a VM, installing a VPN, reverse-enginerring Discord, etc). I'd like to put more emphasis on what most people should consider:

If you goal is only to stop Discord from finding out which games you play, as @PausePause pointed out, Discord itself does not provide any option for that. The closest that can be achieved is by running Discord in a browser, which will confine Discord inside a secure sandbox and will prevent it from exploring the rest of your system.

Note that this will also disable a few other features that also require access outside the sandbox¹. However, I've been using Discord in a browser everyday for over a year, and it works well, so it may be a viable solution for you. Best is to try!

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¹: Certain features like push-to-talk/push-to-mute won't work if you don't have the browser window focused, but all important features (voice chats, screen sharing, etc.) should work fine.

Answer 2

Discord will always detect what game you're playing.

This is a core feature of the service and cannot be disabled using standard settings. As you noted, you can toggle the "Display current activity as a status message" setting to hide what game you're playing from other friends on discord. The service will still show what you're playing to you, but nobody else can see it.

This continues to be an occasional complaint on the Discord forums

Answer 3

Treat unwanted features as malware

Isolate the process. There's various things you can do, with various degrees of effectiveness depending on just how invasive the program's snooping is.

If all you want from it is the chatbox, there's no reason it should run on the same (virtual) computer that you're gaming on.

• Run it in a container or Virtual Machine. There's various methods: Qubes, KVM, FireJail, VMWare, and so on; or:
• Run it as a separate user with minimal/no permissions except what it absolutely needs (network access, I suppose), or:
• Use the browser version (which runs in the browser's sandbox, and thus has no access to your other programs).

Also: Give it it's own internet connection (proxy or VPN) if you think it can/will do an end-run around this. Bit paranoid, as it's unlikely it effectively can.

Or, I guess, if you don't want it isolated, you'll have to reverse engineer it and strip out the bits of code that do the thing you do not want (look for hooks/calls to OS functions that enumerate processes, trace from there, replace function calls with NOPs). How difficult that is depends on how much obfuscation effort was made and what language the program is written in.

Also, even though this would be much harder, it'd be much better in general if people stopped using closed-source software for utilities like this. There's many alternatives that do respect the user's wishes and do not phone home, spy, access memory/processes, and do who knows what else, protected by inane IP laws written by technophobes.

Answer 4

run it in a virtual machine (VM)

• pick a VM software that can run on your OS (i like Virtualbox and it works on Linux/mac/windows. lets say you use virtualbox. there are other VM software you can use.)
• use Virtualbox to create a VM with 3 GB memory (i say 3GB because i use Cinnamon and it uses 2+ GB memory) and 1 core and storage with 100 GB dynamic (dynamic means it only uses disk space on the host as the VM writes new files)
• install Linux on the VM (i suggest Debian "stable")
  • [optional] install Virtualbox guest-additions to make mouse/keyboard easier to use
• install Discord on the VM
• start discord in the VM and start using it
• done

now that Discord is in a VM it can not see your active video games.

p.s. i know another user suggested use a VM. but his post does not give the specific steps needed on how to create and use a VM and so i think my post is significantly different than his.