Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface

kotaku.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 138 posts

Re: Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface

#71

Post by delecti »

anonymous_user9 wrote: post #2

Notably, by doing this Discord lied in their initial announcement. They originally said [1] that all processing would be on-device, but that's not true for users subject to this "experiment". 1: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...

I don't want to defend Discord, but that's just not true. That announcement did not say all processing would be on-device, only when you use the face scan.

> Video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user’s device

> Facial scans never leave your device. Discord and our vendor partners never receive it.

Meanwhile they're also clear that uploaded IDs do get sent to "partners":

> Quick deletion: Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.

Re: Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface

#72

Post by bitfilped »

uyzstvqs wrote: post #45

Can't we just do this age verification locally on-device? Just some WASM to run a small AI model, which scans face+ID. I know it'll be easier to bypass, but that does not matter. We're trying to stop children, not adults with technical skill.

They are not trying to stop children, they are tying to vet verify and collect information on anyone adult or kid.

Re: Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface

#73

Post by sinnsro »

hinata08 wrote: post #56
rockskon wrote: post #12

"Discord Distances itself from Peter Thiel's Palantir Age Verification Firm" means jack shit if they're still doing business with them. And Discord has approached this in such a monstrously awful way that I don't know what they could possibly say at this point to make me believe them. I fully expect Discord will buddy-buddy right back up with some other Thiel-affiliated company if there is a separation if not go righ…

To do the Simpsons quotes like suggested in the article, Discord picking age verification "third party providers" definitely looks like they park various vans across the street. One of them didn't delete IDs properly and leaked them. Now Peter Thiel's Age verification truck has been parked across the street for 2 weeks. How long does it take to deliver a pizza ? They need to replace it with Flowers By Irene van ? Who…

Executives who focus on the financial side of things and do not care about correctness in operations are the ones steering lots of companies nowadays. Boeing is a good example/case study on how financialisation eats up companies from the inside by emphasising monetary results over actual engineering.

Re: Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface

#74

Post by sghitbyabazooka »

uyzstvqs wrote: post #45

Can't we just do this age verification locally on-device? Just some WASM to run a small AI model, which scans face+ID. I know it'll be easier to bypass, but that does not matter. We're trying to stop children, not adults with technical skill.

k-id, owned by epic games, which is one of the age verification companies used by discord, already does something like what you proposed. of course, our favourite infosec twitter zoomers already dissected it. https://github.com/xyzeva/k-id-age-verifier

Re: Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface

#76

Post by [deleted] »

Morromist wrote: post #3
anonymous_user9 wrote: post #2

Notably, by doing this Discord lied in their initial announcement. They originally said [1] that all processing would be on-device, but that's not true for users subject to this "experiment". 1: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...

As Argento Dragone said in the Kotaku comments: "Face scanning is used to do ID verification on your device and then deleted immediately." "By immediately I mean we send it to k-ID who said that's what they do." "By that I mean they partnered with Persona to do the actual verification." "Persona clarified that by 'immediately' they mean 'after seven days.'" "And given their ties to Palantir, it's probably fine. You t…

[deleted]

Re: Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface

#77

Post by fragmede »

uyzstvqs wrote: post #45

Can't we just do this age verification locally on-device? Just some WASM to run a small AI model, which scans face+ID. I know it'll be easier to bypass, but that does not matter. We're trying to stop children, not adults with technical skill.

children have access to 4chan and ChatGPT. hacking the macOS kernel driver to disable the LED that says the camera is on should be out of the technical realm of children, but, well, it happened and was abused by children against other children.

Re: Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface

#78

Post by booi »

troupo wrote: post #67
nottorp wrote: post #46

Who cares where they outsource the age verification to? They have no business keeping my ID scan or face in any case. Because there's an 120% chance they'll end up on a public S3 bucket.

> Because there's an 120% chance they'll end up on a public S3 bucket. They already ended up there: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo

That’s only 100% tho

Re: Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface

#79

Post by api »

JoeDohn wrote: post #75

They did test the water, they will be back at it again. We have seen this over and over. If you use that bloated software, time to move.

It’s a network. You can move but will your community?

We are absolute slaves to network effects. How many things do you continue to use even though you hate them because everyone else also continues to use them even though most hate them?

Defeating the dragon of the network effect would be a great victory for human empowerment in the 21st century.

Re: Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface

#80

Post by rawgreaze »

Neywiny wrote: post #68
nottorp wrote: post #46

Who cares where they outsource the age verification to? They have no business keeping my ID scan or face in any case. Because there's an 120% chance they'll end up on a public S3 bucket.

That's what gets me too. It feels so easy. Just don't store the source data. They usually say they don't, they claim it's deleted quickly or never saved to disk at all or other stuff and its always lies. Just don't save it and there's no attack vector. Same thing with plaintext passwords. The amount of password leak attacks I've seen in recent years is 0 (though I'm sure they're still around). Stored IDs and PII for…

The trick is that they delete the actual image of the face, but the embeddings (which can reconstruct the face anyway) are saved permanently onto their servers. You don't own your embeddings, and they never delete them.
Post reply on HN