I've had a Discord account for 10 years. They seem to assume all discord users are at least teenagers, so surely they can't think I was 8 when I created the account. So can't I have the "full" experience automatically?
Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
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Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
#822I have mentioned this before, but age verification can be solved by hash chains. They can prove age without compromising privacy. It is crazy that the solutions Discord goes for are IDs and selfies. It definitely gives the impression that there are shady ulterior motives. Hash chains are simple. If they were adopted, Discord would clearly be in bad faith taking the steps that they do now. If you search you will find…
How would that mechanism work in practice, though? If every parent needs to become a trusted authority, wouldn’t that just move the goalpost? Who would be the trusted authority, and who would implement that?
I agree that the mechanism is elegant, but figuring out which entity should be trusted in a way that scales globally is somewhat difficult.
Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
#823I have mentioned this before, but age verification can be solved by hash chains. They can prove age without compromising privacy. It is crazy that the solutions Discord goes for are IDs and selfies. It definitely gives the impression that there are shady ulterior motives. Hash chains are simple. If they were adopted, Discord would clearly be in bad faith taking the steps that they do now. If you search you will find…
If the input is "give ID", what the software claims to do is almost meaningless since you cannot prove that software was running. What do I care that someone can tell me they built a privacy-first way of validating IDs/age if I cannot be sure that is the software they are running?
They can just as easily save the ID to disk and return "all good" for all I know.
Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
#824Here'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…
And do they really actually delete it this time?
Once it's out there the only assumption that holds is no trust, and therefore all bets are off.
Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
#825I have mentioned this before, but age verification can be solved by hash chains. They can prove age without compromising privacy. It is crazy that the solutions Discord goes for are IDs and selfies. It definitely gives the impression that there are shady ulterior motives. Hash chains are simple. If they were adopted, Discord would clearly be in bad faith taking the steps that they do now. If you search you will find…
How would that mechanism work in practice, though? If every parent needs to become a trusted authority, wouldn’t that just move the goalpost? Who would be the trusted authority, and who would implement that? I agree that the mechanism is elegant, but figuring out which entity should be trusted in a way that scales globally is somewhat difficult.
The use of the parent is an example. In reality it would be some official age checking provider (maybe the government).
Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
#826Here'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…
> The ID is immediately deleted. We do not keep any information around like your name, the city that you live in, if you used a birth certificate or something else, any of that information. This is also contradicted by what Discord actually says: > Quick deletion: Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation. What are the non-most cases?
Well since you have these IDs, for national security (AML, criminals and whatnot), we will need you to keep them if our endpoint says so, here's the endpoint
https://.gov/print?text=trueRe: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
#827How convenient how "age restriction" leads to mass surveillance. Also makes me wonder how people used to promote discord in the past. Big Brother is watching you.
That’s why you never promote anything, or if you do, you do it with full awareness that you are being irresponsible, because you don’t know what the future holds, and acting like things won’t change is incredibly shallow.
Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
#828I'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…
Value-focused organizations mean nothing to me. They throw out their values as soon as they are in the way of financial success.
Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
#829I hope Discord understands the risks they pose to their audience when they open source their IDs again. Discord is used by a bunch of closeted users having pseudos, who wouldn't do the same activities on it if everyone had their names. A part of the Discord users is from countries from which Discord isn't even officially accessible (eg China) or where involvement in LGBT discussions could result to death row (Afghani…
I REALLY doubt anyone XYZ while XYZ is illegal/pursued/banned in their country hasn't already extensively thought about their own threat model, and that disclosing this kind of infomration on a public platform is not safe.
Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
#830I have mentioned this before, but age verification can be solved by hash chains. They can prove age without compromising privacy. It is crazy that the solutions Discord goes for are IDs and selfies. It definitely gives the impression that there are shady ulterior motives. Hash chains are simple. If they were adopted, Discord would clearly be in bad faith taking the steps that they do now. If you search you will find…
How would that mechanism work in practice, though? If every parent needs to become a trusted authority, wouldn’t that just move the goalpost? Who would be the trusted authority, and who would implement that? I agree that the mechanism is elegant, but figuring out which entity should be trusted in a way that scales globally is somewhat difficult.
Realistically this would be another service attached to the government ID. Something like this does function in some European countries, doesn’t it?