There is no legitimate reason to impose age verification on users in jurisdictions that do not legally mandate it.
It is a risk to the privacy and safety of all users on the platform - it provides an easier way for pedophiles to identify underage users and provides more doxable information.
Discord has no business making this decision on behalf of jurisdictions that do not legally mandate it.
ravenstine 1 hours ago [-]
I totally agree. At the same time, nobody should be using Discord anyway, for a variety of reasons. They're one of the least trustworthy online platforms I can think of, and have unfortunately encouraged online ecosystems where you have to "Join our Discord" in order to maybe be heard. I would be delighted if age verification encourage more people to abandon Discord. In a better world, companies like that wouldn't be allowed to become zombie corporations but instead be forced to go out of business.
hax0ron3 51 minutes ago [-]
What's untrustworthy about them? I enjoy using Discord, so I should probably learn about that.
ravenstine 41 minutes ago [-]
They'll shut down servers and close your account with no reason provided outside of demanding you add a phone number. It's happened to me a few times, and I was squeaky clean on there even when compared to the way I talk on HN. Didn't matter whether I provided a phone number. I'm not the only one it's happened to. Anyone with friends on Discord should make sure to write down their contact information in case Discord one day decides that they or their community doesn't exist anymore. But do they delete your data? No, of course they don't... they keep it all to themselves!
Scaled 12 minutes ago [-]
THIS. Nearly lost several large owned 'servers' on the account, too, due to the phone number demands! Support was awful, making needless month long hoops and ultimately not helping me at all.
Meanwhile Discourse (the open source forum software) has recently added voice and video calling. Matrix is a good option, also.
yndoendo 42 minutes ago [-]
They require a phone number for creating an account. That right here is a never use in my book.
Grombobulous 1 hours ago [-]
> it provides an easier way for pedophiles to identify underage users and provides more doxable information.
Do you have any basis for assuming that that users who are under 18 will have that information revealed to other users? That’s not what I read in this article.
I also think you’re being quite prescriptive about a private commercial service. You’re entitled to your opinion, of course, but companies enact restrictions to their products and services not required by law all the time.
If Discord wants to make their service require a mandatory declaration of allegiance to the Klingon empire, they’re allowed to do that.
hananova 6 minutes ago [-]
It’s actually trivially easy to detect if someone isn’t verified adult: If you DM them something normal it’ll go through, but if you try to send them any image marked as spoiler it’ll show you an error, and they don’t see anything.
So yes, it’s super easy for groomers to focus on children with this update.
iAMkenough 43 minutes ago [-]
You don't have to be a user to be a pedophile. Could be a developer too, seeking the attestation for users to target.
FireBeyond 47 minutes ago [-]
Well, there's a lot more low-hanging fruit there to be had.
It was sadly too trivial using various Discord search engines to find things like BDSM servers advertising to "14-28 year olds", or ones where minors openly sell NSFW content.
Discord as a whole is oftentimes enabling the communities to prey on those users, not just making the users more identifiable.
senectus1 39 minutes ago [-]
i dont like it, but.... its their platform. Dont like it, dont use it.
I think i'm going to run down the dont use it path, which is a shame, because i do use it atm.
mysterydip 21 minutes ago [-]
There’s secondary effects from not using their platform to consider as well. There’s several applications (open and closed source) I used recently that moved all their support (email/forums) to discord.
ashleyn 2 hours ago [-]
One major controversy I recall with VRchat's implementation of age assurance (via Persona) is that they retained identity of who you were after completing the process. Not who exactly, but your identity was hashed so that if the same person attempted to verify again they could tell who it is. This effectively meant one individual can have one validated account per lifetime. If the flakey AI moderation banned you for an emoji combination freshly deemed racist/etc, you effectively lost your only shot at a validated VRchat account forever.
This is an issue with age assurance that goes well beyond just verifying age, and is undoubtedly viewed as a fringe benefit of age assurance for those wishing to deanonymise the internet. There's obvious problems with this beyond just "can't ban evade anymore". Authorities or intelligence can run bulk hashes against sets of IDs to effectively deanonymise all accounts.
The question here is, does Discord do the same thing for any or all of the selected options? Or is identity data full well and truly purged once the outcome is determined - no hashing, nothing retained other than the result?
linkregister 47 minutes ago [-]
Discord offers age verification via AgeKey [1]. Reading their privacy policy, one can create multiple AgeKeys based on the same identification or face scan. Each AgeKey is stored as a passkey and not persisted anywhere else. The privacy policy indicates that the identification information is submitted to 3rd party providers, and also appears to be used for general internet company marketing and promotions, similarly invasive to buying a pair of shoes online. That is, your identity will be propagated to ad networks by AgeKey as it similarly does for ecommerce.
Discord cannot determine identity from the AgeKey.
>The question here is, does Discord do the same thing for any or all of the selected options? Or is identity data full well and truly purged once the outcome is determined - no hashing, nothing retained other than the result?
What they actually do is irrelevant since none of these companies should ever be trusted to do what they claim they will do.
peri-cl 2 hours ago [-]
> "We're launching this over the course of this week, so it may take a few days to reach your account."
That's obviously not a technical requirement; they're doing this because they expect a large volume of negative publicity, and temporally staggering this rollout means users are less able to coordinate their social-media outrage.
Same logic Reddit used in phasing out the rollout of their controversial login wall. One group says "I can't log in!"; the other says, "huh, it works for me?"
Scaled 4 minutes ago [-]
They will also likely dial up the sensitivity of the system over time. Maybe initially 90% of users are let through without doxxing themselves, like Discord claims. But over time, they have the knob to turn up the sensitivity to get more verifications so eventually everyone is verified. They love to exploit the network effect of making people think they're missing out while all their friends are in, exact same strategy they've used for years with the sudden demand for phone numbers on good standing accounts.
rustcleaner 3 hours ago [-]
IRC plus GNU Jami are still freedom respecting zones! I sincerely hope all this age verification crap causes cypherpunk FOSS solutions to grow in popularity.
noosphr 2 hours ago [-]
Just remember that systemd added age verification in Linux without anyone asking.
There are freedom respecting Linux projects, but those lead by redhat\ibm employees (past and present) don't.
Grombobulous 1 hours ago [-]
The age verification API in operating systems is a really good idea for privacy and parental control, so long as it doesn’t require literally collecting your ID (it doesn’t).
Look at it from the perspective of a parent giving a device to a kid. Before, you’d have to deal with a maze of blocking content. You’d have to allow/blocklist a huge number of apps and services manually. If your kid discovers some new one you or your blocking service has never heard of, they’ve gotten around your parental control wishes.
With the age verification API, you just set the age in the OS (and lock it down with MDM or whatever) and now all the apps and websites have to respect it and act accordingly.
Your kid can’t just make a new account or download another browser or do some other crazy workaround to get around your restrictions. That setting is there at the OS level.
marsbars241 32 minutes ago [-]
It’s systemd. They seem to be making it their mission to windows-ify Linux anyways.
rrego 2 hours ago [-]
Its just a system that optionally exposes a birthday read from a json db. You don't have to use it, and you don't have to use applications that rely on it. And if you are going to use applications that have an age verification, this is a pretty serviceable standard.
I don't understand the uproar. Systemd isn't perfect but it gets so much hate for the value it provides
noosphr 1 hours ago [-]
Why doesn't it do the same for sex, gender, religion, race, sexuality, felon etc.?
Those are also just fields, and there's incoming laws in countries that target them. No internet for unsupervised women for example. You wouldn't want to break usability for the fine government servants of Afghanistan would you?
rustcleaner 2 hours ago [-]
It can be extricated, or bypassed. The benefits of FOSS are myriad.
thetallguyyy 2 hours ago [-]
It won't. Most people don't care about privacy or FOSS. I've been trying to get my friends to switch to something else for years, and they couldn't care less.
ID verification is the least of my worries, to be honest. I've been on the internet long enough to acknowledge a need for something like that. I'm uncomfortable with the fact that data is a valuable commodity now. Discord is storing my online habits and conversations somewhere on their servers. Deleting that information is deleting money.
If people weren't worried about that before, then they certainly won't care now.
VCFundedGenYer 1 hours ago [-]
You're quite wrong in your assumptions. Most Discord users are moving away from the platform. Fluxer is gaining traction very quickly.
nemomarx 57 minutes ago [-]
I would put money down that 50% of discord users are not moving away from the platform and won't before the end of the year. And if I'm wrong I happily get to move to a new platform so it's a win win bet :v
perching_aix 39 minutes ago [-]
> Most Discord users are moving away from the platform
I dread the day I'll make claims like this, even figuratively.
Even at a most surface level reading, this would suggest something like their MAU (monthly active users) at least halving soon/already.
I'd be very surprised if it was trending down even, let alone at this! Forget hyperbole, this is an outright überbole.
By all means though, got any data?
iwontberude 3 hours ago [-]
Matrix has become invaluable for dozens of my hacker friends. We ditched Discord almost a year ago and we have no desire to go back. Besides having high quality e2ee voice/video/screensharing (thanks LiveKit), we collectively spend 10x less for the functionality and keep our data in Switzerland. No ads, no one getting their accounts hacked with QR codes, ultra-granular space/channel settings, multiple choices for client implementations, and end to end encryption enables sensitive discussions that would have previously been curtailed. The identity verification is greatly appreciated although our new users do have some issues getting set up with multiple devices, but it's no more complicated than multi-device WhatsApp. Matrix is ready for prime time.
rustcleaner 2 hours ago [-]
Nice! Last time I used Matrix there was really no voice/video calling. I'll have to check it out again! :D
ggm 42 minutes ago [-]
I muse about the disconnect of people terminally online (myself included) and their tendency to assume their position is the overton window centre, and my experiences talking to people in real life about things like mandatory age checks for social systems.
I get it. People want to keep their (pseudo)anonymity and details private.
I also get it. People in the real world are scared shitless, legitemately or not, about the effect social media has on young minds.
CaliforniaKarl 2 hours ago [-]
A long time ago, I'd participate in things like CAcert in-person assurance, PGP key-signing, etc.. I think a model like that would've been useful here: An AgeKey issued/signed by two people. I think of it like a decentralized equivalent to someone's parents saying "Yeah, $CHILD is old enough", or to a cashier saying "This person obviously looks old".
axus 3 hours ago [-]
There was a brief window where you could submit fake biometrics through a third-party site to verify age on Discord, pretty sure I got the link from hackernews.
That made me feel better that Discord didn't need to store my ID or video of my face, and was only storing the results of some analysis and not the inputs.
burningChrome 2 hours ago [-]
When the social media ban went into effect in Australia last year, kids were submitting photos of their parents and dogs to get around the verification. Not sure how better or worse they've gotten, but the old adage of trying to keep things from kids only motivates them more to get around the limitations you put up.
> ... the old adage of trying to keep things from kids only motivates them more to get around the limitations you put up.
This will be a boon for FOSS.
44 minutes ago [-]
ZeWaka 33 minutes ago [-]
Yep, still waiting to see if they disqualify those old determinations.
Foskya 4 hours ago [-]
I actually like their implementation.
I'm curious if it will be enough for governments, but it is nice that they are trying to persue a path without id checks
dsr_ 3 hours ago [-]
All the available paths turn into:
- give us your ID
- give us your biometrics
- give somebody, not necessarily Discord, a valid credit card
That's sll of the paths.
secabeen 43 minutes ago [-]
I can imagine a few more. Here's one that is 100% effective:
* Wait until your account was created > 18 years ago.
That may not be enough for you, and that's fine, this is not a governmental service or site, with a mandate to serve everyone. You can chose not to use discord, and discord can choose not to have you as a customer. YMMV.
aDyslecticCrow 3 hours ago [-]
This proposed solution does however allow quite liberal access to discord without confirming the age. If the implementation is as worded; then i would not see a reason to confirm my age at all.
The issue comes down to if governments accept such a (urgh) comparatively lax implementation. It's pretty clear to me that the primary purpose of these laws are entirely to... force all citizens to identify themselves across the internet for the purpose of profile building, and nothing to do with child safety.
So as implementations go; this one is pretty decent. We should stop governments from passing these darn laws though.
nemomarx 3 hours ago [-]
If the account age estimation puts you in adult, it sounds like you don't need to do any of those?
I'd like to see details about their model there, but account age is at least better than a lot of systems like steam are doing for this.
I think it's interesting they limit the types of content they use to determine your age. I'd guess they don't impose those same limitations when it comes to other uses (including targeted ads)
t0bia_s 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds like scam.
EmbarrassedHelp 3 hours ago [-]
They should not be trying to implement it globally. That is unacceptable.
shaoonb 3 hours ago [-]
Still required to use a video or ID card in the UK.
CaliforniaKarl 2 hours ago [-]
A friend of mine, who lives in the UK, says that he's been offered the credit-card verification option.
esafak 3 hours ago [-]
I like that the dialog indicates the service provider. Thumbs up for transparency.
VCFundedGenYer 1 hours ago [-]
The feature is still DOA. Most people are moving to other alternatives like Fluxer.
Discord will kill themselves if they continue with this nonsense.
aroman 1 hours ago [-]
"Most people?" Do you have a source for that claim?
Rapzid 52 minutes ago [-]
Sounds like Discord will announce Friday they lost most of their users?
StanislavPetrov 1 hours ago [-]
It doesn't have to be "most" is just has to be "many". As everyone knows, it is all about growth and gaining users for these companies. Having a shrinking pool of users rather than a growing one is the kiss of death.
Grombobulous 57 minutes ago [-]
This would be a moved goalpost from the idea that “most” people are leaving discord.
We’ve been saying these things about Mastodon and Blue Sky for a long time but they’ve also remained niche.
There is no legitimate reason to impose age verification on users in jurisdictions that do not legally mandate it.
It is a risk to the privacy and safety of all users on the platform - it provides an easier way for pedophiles to identify underage users and provides more doxable information.
Discord has no business making this decision on behalf of jurisdictions that do not legally mandate it.
Meanwhile Discourse (the open source forum software) has recently added voice and video calling. Matrix is a good option, also.
Do you have any basis for assuming that that users who are under 18 will have that information revealed to other users? That’s not what I read in this article.
I also think you’re being quite prescriptive about a private commercial service. You’re entitled to your opinion, of course, but companies enact restrictions to their products and services not required by law all the time.
If Discord wants to make their service require a mandatory declaration of allegiance to the Klingon empire, they’re allowed to do that.
So yes, it’s super easy for groomers to focus on children with this update.
It was sadly too trivial using various Discord search engines to find things like BDSM servers advertising to "14-28 year olds", or ones where minors openly sell NSFW content.
Discord as a whole is oftentimes enabling the communities to prey on those users, not just making the users more identifiable.
I think i'm going to run down the dont use it path, which is a shame, because i do use it atm.
This is an issue with age assurance that goes well beyond just verifying age, and is undoubtedly viewed as a fringe benefit of age assurance for those wishing to deanonymise the internet. There's obvious problems with this beyond just "can't ban evade anymore". Authorities or intelligence can run bulk hashes against sets of IDs to effectively deanonymise all accounts.
The question here is, does Discord do the same thing for any or all of the selected options? Or is identity data full well and truly purged once the outcome is determined - no hashing, nothing retained other than the result?
Discord cannot determine identity from the AgeKey.
1. https://agekey.org/
What they actually do is irrelevant since none of these companies should ever be trusted to do what they claim they will do.
That's obviously not a technical requirement; they're doing this because they expect a large volume of negative publicity, and temporally staggering this rollout means users are less able to coordinate their social-media outrage.
Same logic Reddit used in phasing out the rollout of their controversial login wall. One group says "I can't log in!"; the other says, "huh, it works for me?"
There are freedom respecting Linux projects, but those lead by redhat\ibm employees (past and present) don't.
Look at it from the perspective of a parent giving a device to a kid. Before, you’d have to deal with a maze of blocking content. You’d have to allow/blocklist a huge number of apps and services manually. If your kid discovers some new one you or your blocking service has never heard of, they’ve gotten around your parental control wishes.
With the age verification API, you just set the age in the OS (and lock it down with MDM or whatever) and now all the apps and websites have to respect it and act accordingly.
Your kid can’t just make a new account or download another browser or do some other crazy workaround to get around your restrictions. That setting is there at the OS level.
I don't understand the uproar. Systemd isn't perfect but it gets so much hate for the value it provides
Those are also just fields, and there's incoming laws in countries that target them. No internet for unsupervised women for example. You wouldn't want to break usability for the fine government servants of Afghanistan would you?
ID verification is the least of my worries, to be honest. I've been on the internet long enough to acknowledge a need for something like that. I'm uncomfortable with the fact that data is a valuable commodity now. Discord is storing my online habits and conversations somewhere on their servers. Deleting that information is deleting money.
If people weren't worried about that before, then they certainly won't care now.
I dread the day I'll make claims like this, even figuratively.
Even at a most surface level reading, this would suggest something like their MAU (monthly active users) at least halving soon/already.
I'd be very surprised if it was trending down even, let alone at this! Forget hyperbole, this is an outright überbole.
By all means though, got any data?
I get it. People want to keep their (pseudo)anonymity and details private.
I also get it. People in the real world are scared shitless, legitemately or not, about the effect social media has on young minds.
That made me feel better that Discord didn't need to store my ID or video of my face, and was only storing the results of some analysis and not the inputs.
For reference: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/dog-photos-vpns-fake-ids-how...
This will be a boon for FOSS.
- give us your ID
- give us your biometrics
- give somebody, not necessarily Discord, a valid credit card
That's sll of the paths.
* Wait until your account was created > 18 years ago.
That may not be enough for you, and that's fine, this is not a governmental service or site, with a mandate to serve everyone. You can chose not to use discord, and discord can choose not to have you as a customer. YMMV.
The issue comes down to if governments accept such a (urgh) comparatively lax implementation. It's pretty clear to me that the primary purpose of these laws are entirely to... force all citizens to identify themselves across the internet for the purpose of profile building, and nothing to do with child safety.
So as implementations go; this one is pretty decent. We should stop governments from passing these darn laws though.
I'd like to see details about their model there, but account age is at least better than a lot of systems like steam are doing for this.
Discord will kill themselves if they continue with this nonsense.
We’ve been saying these things about Mastodon and Blue Sky for a long time but they’ve also remained niche.
Discord really isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.