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

Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 1001 posts

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#121

Post by joks »

encom wrote: post #83
bramhaag wrote: post #20

What realistic open source alternatives to Discord are there? I'm currently considering moving to one of these with my friend group: - Matrix - Stoat, previously revolt ( https://stoat.chat/ ) - IRC + Mumble - Signal

IRC was here before Discord, and it will still be here after. I've never heard of Stoat. Looks like IRC but it's Electron. Total waste of time.

IRC does not support group voice & video calls, which is one of the primary features of Discord (and previously Skype, from which everyone migrated to Discord in the first place)

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#122

Post by plingbang »

> Teen-by-default settings to roll out globally for all Discord users

Does it mean that even people who reside outside jurisdictions touched by the age verification craze will have to deal with all this?

> use facial age estimation

Surely a kid won't be able to ask someone else to pass the check for them. But let's talk about false positives. If the estimator falsely declares someone an adult, is Discord legally liable?

> submit a form of identification

If you have a picture of an ID document, can you verify that it's real? You'd have to ask the government for that. And at least in one country there is no process for that.

> On-device processing

Oh, a client-side check. Must be secure.

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#124

Post by joks »

superxpro12 wrote: post #75
Rooster61 wrote: post #6

The sad thing is that I think many people will en masse pony up their ID or snapshot without a second thought. I'm not sure if enough people will refuse to actually force Discord to back off this decision (unless their idea is to grab as much data as possible at once with the understanding that they are going to back off either way).

I get the draconian side of things, but I am also tired of thousands of russian, indian, domestic-funded etc. bots flooding the zone with divisive propaganda. In theory, this seems like it would at least be a step in the direction of combating disinformation. I'm curious if there are any better ways to suppress these propaganda machines?

I don't see how disallowing viewing "age-restricted" content through Discord without giving them your ID would have any impact on the spread of disinformation, outside of like, disinfo in the form or pornographic or gory images.

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#127

Post by altairprime »

https://docs.k-id.com/concepts/verification-methods/

The company that Discord uses lists the methods they accept above. Notably, they do not accept any privacy-protecting digital identity standards from US or EU citizens; they only implement national ID verifications where they receive a full birthdate, with the sole exception of AU where they allow banks to attest to age-majority.

Leveraging this press to highlight their clear desire-for / dependency-on being provided an explicit birthdate, rather than simply a bool backed by the government, would be an effective lever to pull through e.g. New York and California governmental privacy efforts — especially if one somehow got them classified as a data broker in California and therefore bound to a much more expensive set of laws, due to their insistence on being provided PII when more privacy-protecting alternatives are available there.

Yes, this isn’t a scorched earth response. Every other thread of discussion here has that covered already and I have nothing new to add there. But for anyone looking to force privacy into the budding age checks verification market at an early stage rather than trying to shut it down, here’s your roadmap to effecting real change on the matter. Good luck.

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#129

Post by malfist »

Hikikomori wrote: post #84
accrual wrote: post #23

Here's the October 2025 Discord data breach mentioned at the end of the article: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo > Discord, a messaging platform popular with gamers, says official ID photos of around 70,000 users have potentially been leaked after a cyber-attack. However, their senior director states in this Verge article: > The ID is immediately deleted. We do not keep any information around like your…

>Why they didn't do that the first time? The company they hired to do the support tickets archived them, including attachments, rather than deleting them.

Ah, so it was the "staffer" excuse.

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#130

Post by superkuh »

The endgame I see is that it will be illegal to communicate on the internet without having a proven bank account. At least in the USA where all ID verification is settling on banks (ie, Plaid). And the banks will tolerate 10,000 false positive denials of service to avoid a single false negative and be happy about it. Plaid even more so. Human beings will have no recourse as they are private companies. This really should be a service that the states of the federal government provide. It's a dark future we're speeding towards.
Post reply on HN