Discord's New Age Checks: Over 90% of Users Won't Be Asked to Verify
An update on how we confirm your age group on Discord
Discord is rolling out a privacy-preserving age assurance system that automatically estimates whether users are adults or teens based on account signals like account age and server activity, without scanning messages or calls. More than 90% of users won't need to confirm their age. Adults see no change; teens get extra protections. Those placed in the wrong group can verify via credit card, Apple, Google, or AgeKey.
To me, that makes it more important than ever to show that this can be done in a privacy-preserving way: one where more than 90% of you won’t have to confirm your age.
- rockskon
Unacceptable.
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.
- ashleyn
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?
- peri-cl
> "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?"
- rustcleaner
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.
- CaliforniaKarl
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".