Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

831–840 of 1001 posts

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

#831

You’re out of your mind if you think I’m gonna upload ID to use a “shitposting about video games with friends” service.

All social media websites should require id tbh. This is the new public town square - everyone should have a voice, but nobody should escape the consequences of using that voice to peddle bullshit.

I've never been to a town square where I had to let some random person photograph my face or tell me to leave.

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

#833

When will it be normalized to be able to say "Parents should just be doing their job" before we decide to ruin everything online for everyone else. Although I know it's not really about protecting the kids. I wonder if the politicians are exempt from this too as they were chat control. > The scanning would apply to all EU citizens, except EU politicians. They might exempt themselves from the law under “professional s…

The amount of time and energy that I have to put in to keep my 3 individual kids safe online while still allowing some access is mind-blowingly high. It shouldn’t be as hard as it is. It’s so hard, in fact, 99.9% of parents give up on it. I’m not one to do that but I’ve strongly considered it many times. Parental controls are fractured across every platform, they can’t enforce everything in one place, domain filterin…

I sympathize with this a lot. What you’re describing really is exhausting, and it shouldn’t be this hard.

My take is that parental controls fail because they’re trying to solve a social and psychological problem at the technical layer. No amount of filters or settings can keep up with the internet, and kids are better at routing around them than we like to admit.

What’s worked better for us is treating this like other hard topics. We talk to our kids directly about social media, disturbing content, and strangers online, the same way we talk to them about drugs or sex.

We’re explicit about why some things aren’t allowed, what kinds of content exist out there beyond just sex, and that if something upsetting happens, telling us is always the right move and won’t cost them our trust or love.

That doesn’t remove all risk, but it shifts the burden from constant surveillance to shared understanding. To me that feels more realistic than trying to centrally control an environment that isn’t controllable.

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

#834
post #810

I 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…

Something like half of Israel's economy is intelligence gathering wtf do you think is happening here it's pretty obvious. economic leverage, surveillance, foreign influence, tech exports being used politically, etc.

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

#835
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…

> 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?

>"Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners"..

Yeah, say goodbye to those the privacy and safety of those documents.

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

#836
post #810

I 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…

Even easier, just get tokens that carry no other information from ones government, and the government runs an API, that for a given token tells whether that token is valid. Can tokens be stolen? Maybe. Can your face be stolen? Today yes.

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

#838

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…

Hi @tabbott I've been meaning to pass this feedback on for 5 months, and I hope it comes across in the spirit it's meant. I tried Zulip (cloud offering) with some techie/designery friends, so we should have been right at home but... the desktop app on macOS and the web app was visually unappealing and clunky, and we ended up going back to a paid Slack plan. I looked for docs on how to theme Zulip (so I could contribu…

My feelings as well.

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

#839
Well I've spent the better part of 7 years building a community on my own discord server with dozens of friends, many of whom I interact with daily in voice.

So... what now? I just have my life literally turned upside down because of a greedy surveillance state?

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

#840
Genreally this is the part of the slope when most everyone perks up and realizes what game is being played.

Combined with recent AUS,UK laws mandating the same across most online services - im sceptical that even opensource offering could evade te dragnet.

We already knew that any ID verification for kids would inevitable mean everyone gets carded then sorted. With this AI profiling essentailly piggybacking on the likes of Facebooks decades long shadow profile shenanigans , and the recent Ring revalation that theyare essentially doing the same via their cameras. Its a bleak panopticaon that has all the essential building blocks in place.

Post reply on HN