Lock Down Your Gaming Accounts: A Real Privacy Checklist for Steam and Discord

Privacy settings on gaming platforms have a reputation for being buried, confusing, and vaguely threatening to touch. They’re none of those things once you know where to look. The two platforms most people live in day to day, Steam and Discord, both give you solid control over who can reach you and what they can see. You just have to flip the right switches.

This is a checklist, not a lecture. Work through it once and you’re set.

Discord: control who can message you

Discord’s most useful privacy lever is the direct-message filter, because unsolicited DMs are the single most common annoyance. Open User Settings, then Privacy & Safety. By default, Discord filters direct messages from people who aren’t your friends, scanning them for unwanted content. You have three choices: filter messages from non-friends, filter all direct messages, or turn filtering off. For most people, filtering non-friend messages is the sensible middle ground.

The more important toggle sits nearby: “Allow direct messages from server members.” By default, anyone in a server you share can slide into your DMs. Turn this off and people can only message you if you’re actual friends. This one setting cuts out the majority of cold, uninvited contact, and you can still opt into DMs with specific people by friending them.

While you’re in there, the sensitive-content filters are worth a look too. Discord can block explicit or graphic images before they ever load, and you can set that behavior separately for DMs from friends and from non-friends. If you’d rather not be surprised by whatever a stranger sends, set the non-friend filter to block.

Discord: tidy up the rest

Two more habits close the loop. First, blocking is your friend, and it’s clean: a blocked user can’t message you, and their messages in shared servers collapse behind a click. You don’t owe anyone an explanation for using it.

Second, review which servers you’re actually in. Large public servers are the usual entry point for unwanted DMs, because that’s where strangers can see you’re online. Leaving a server you no longer use quietly removes a channel for contact you never asked for.

Steam: decide who sees your activity

Steam’s privacy lives in one place. Click your profile name, choose View My Profile, hit Edit Profile, then Privacy Settings. The setting most people want is Game Details, which controls who can see the games you own, play, and wishlist.

You have the same clean options here. Friends Only means only your Steam friends see your game activity. Private means nobody does, including friends. If the idea of people tracking what you’re playing and when feels uncomfortable, Friends Only handles it for most situations, and Private locks it down completely.

You can also set the broader “My Profile” visibility. Leaving it public but setting Game Details to Friends Only is a common, balanced choice: people can still find and add you, but your play habits stay among people you know.

Steam: the finer controls

A few smaller settings are worth knowing. You can hide individual games from your library by right-clicking a title and choosing Manage, then Mark as Private, useful when you want most of your library visible but a few games kept quiet.

Your online status is separate from all of this. In Steam Chat, clicking Friends lets you set yourself to Invisible, which keeps you connected and able to message people while appearing offline to everyone else. It’s the low-effort way to play without announcing it.

The five-minute version

If you only do the essentials, do these. On Discord: turn off DMs from server members, and set your DM filter to catch non-friend messages. On Steam: set Game Details to Friends Only, and learn where the Invisible status lives.

Those four changes handle the overwhelming majority of unwanted contact and unwanted visibility, and none of them cut you off from the friends and communities you actually want. Privacy on these platforms isn’t about locking everything down until gaming feels lonely. It’s about deciding, deliberately, who gets access to you. The tools are already there. Now you know where.