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

theverge.com

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

#641

Post by einpoklum »

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…

> We do not keep any information around like your name

But they might be sending a copy to the NSA, similarly to how Alphabet, Yahoo, Apple, Meta etc. have been doing (PRISM program, part of the Snowden revelation [1]). The US has the legal mechanisms of requiring this to happen, secretly, such as NSLs [2].

[1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

[2] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter

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

#643

Post by voxl »

minneapoliced wrote: post #638
tabbott wrote: post #430

I'm biased, as I lead the Zulip project. But I think this is a reasonable place for me to post some thoughts. Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like Discord, Google (Gmail), and Meta have databases with access to the private conversations of hundreds of millions of people with their closest friends and family members, linked up with…

[flagged]

Yes, American Hitler is in fact Hitler perhaps you're cool with:

1. Extrajudicious execution of US citizens 2. Construction of concentration camps 3. Openly saying that you'll interfere with state elections 4. Openly saying you'll take away guns and dimish gun rights

Let's just be honest with ourselves. No one. And I mean no one, can support Donald Trump and be a principled decent human being, conservative or otherwise.

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

#645

Post by Lermatroid »

cedws wrote: post #615

I understand the frustration towards Discord, especially because this is a global rollout of a policy they're only required to enforce in specific countries, but it's IMO misdirected. They're likely trying to get ahead of the legislation. The way the winds are blowing indicates the Western governments that haven't already passed legislation mandating ID verification soon will. You can move to $ALT_PLATFORM but unless…

This. Still canning my nitro sub for now as I do think they should hold off until necessary, but people ignore that the root of this trend of ID verification is governments who are willfully ignorant to having staff who can accurately assess the technological landscape and enforce smart regulation.

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

#646

Post by Peacefulz »

The writing has been on the wall for a while. I moved off of Discord about a year and a half ago, after they started gating long-time free features behind Nitro. Then later, I find out that nothing is encrypted in transit on their application. I haven't had much luck moving friends off of the platform and on to things like Matrix, or Signal yet... but I'm trying all the time.

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

#647

Post by 8note »

tabbott wrote: post #430

I'm biased, as I lead the Zulip project. But I think this is a reasonable place for me to post some thoughts. Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like Discord, Google (Gmail), and Meta have databases with access to the private conversations of hundreds of millions of people with their closest friends and family members, linked up with…

how does zulip as a technical solution solve the ultimate problems with discord and gmail and so on - EU chat control, US porn control, etc?

arent you as a zulip instance owner going to have to implement all the same stuff as discord?

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

#648

Post by JuniperMesos »

minneapoliced wrote: post #638
tabbott wrote: post #430

I'm biased, as I lead the Zulip project. But I think this is a reasonable place for me to post some thoughts. Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like Discord, Google (Gmail), and Meta have databases with access to the private conversations of hundreds of millions of people with their closest friends and family members, linked up with…

[flagged]

Understandable, but sometimes there isn't a better alternative that doesn't do user support via Discord. That's why it's important to have alternatives that work, so unrelated companies don't pick centralized platform chat software that happens to be convenient for their immediate needs.

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

#649

Post by crabmusket »

minneapoliced wrote: post #638
tabbott wrote: post #430

I'm biased, as I lead the Zulip project. But I think this is a reasonable place for me to post some thoughts. Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like Discord, Google (Gmail), and Meta have databases with access to the private conversations of hundreds of millions of people with their closest friends and family members, linked up with…

[flagged]

> enforcing the law

This is like believing DOGE was about efficiency :)

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

#650

Post by kmeisthax »

pibaker wrote: post #209

It is a great irony that the heavy handed push for "protect da kids" is all happening while we learn, day by day, that the richest and most powerful members of our society have no problem hanging out with a convicted child sex trafficker. Rules for thee, free love for me.

The extremely cynical take: All of this is by design for well-connected billionaire pedophile rings to kill competition from millionaire pedophile rings.

The less cynical take: Billionaire pedophilia is just a really dramatic consequence of us building a society that cannot make billionaires accountable for their crimes. There's not much connection between that and the government overreach being done in an attempt to put regular pedophiles to justice.

Discord is overcompensating for their extremely lax child safety record. It's not terribly difficult to find servers full of child groomers on Discord that are rarely banned. Same thing with Roblox. The business model of social media presumes that the average user is going to require almost no attention from the moderation team. That's why, for example, removing CDA 230 safe harbor provisions in US law would be so catastrophic to online discourse. The only way any company can justify the risk of publishing Someone Else's Speech is if that risk is literally zero.

The same calculus means that when we start requiring social media companies care about children on their platform, they immediately reach for the solutions that are trivially automated: ID and face scans. These companies are shoestring operations for their size, so everything has to "scale" on day one.

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