911–920 of 1001 posts
I think Apple / Google need to implement verification on the device - we already accept the device knows who we are. And then social media platforms should be able to have the device confirm the user is over 18 and that’s all they need to know.
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…
Some of the big weaknesses of running a self-hosted Zulip server for your community are: - Your server admin can see DMs (or at least metadata, not sure if Zulip does E2E for DMs). The same is true for centralized services in theory, but unless you're a terrorist or a person of interest to a major government, it's extremely unlikely that a Discord employee will have an incentive to spy on your messages specifically.…
So basically Discord is a warez service?
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
... "around"
It should go without saying but, *CANCEL YOUR NITRO SUBSCRIPTION NOW IF YOU'RE PAYING FOR ONE* (for whatever reason) This was just announced today and a flood of canceled payments within the next 24 hours are the easiest way to send a message. And also tell people on the servers you're on to do the same. It's not like they give you anything of real value for that money.
Just cancelled mine after reading this comment, I only really cared about the bigger file uploads and the HD screen-sharing anyways and I can live without those. Now that I think of it, I bet I could host a decent instance of some open-source alternative in a public cloud for around the same cost as what I paid for Nitro ($100 a year)...
With the current US administration all the worlds citizens should be careful about their data in the hands of US corporations. Unlike China, US has and can kidnap you from your own country if they feel like it even if not citizens of US. This was the case with previous US administration but they tried to at least follow their own laws if not international laws. This administration does not care about US laws or Inter…
One can easily implement a nationwide system like this. You can trust people in your own community. There are no central govt actors. In such a system no one has any knowledge of which service you are proving your identity/age for and the cryptographic approval can be done without any ids being exchanged. The input to the ombudsman is a hash you provide which he can sign with his key and send to a server, that can ask the ombudsman: "this thing you are signing is for age verification > 18, check persons ID and press confirm if that's the case". The ombudsman presses confirm after checking the id and you are done. Every city municipality can elect a local councilman/notaries to do this, for a small fees.
(( This is a repost of what I shared on Reddit here https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/1r05vkj/comment... but I think the context will be helpful for this group, too. This article title is very misleading. )) Tl;dr: The vast majority of adults will never have to interact with our age assurance systems and their experience won't change, because we know Discord and how people use it, so we're designing to res…
If you still require an ID for those accounts, that means you don't really care about age verification, you just want to tie people to a government ID.
I think Apple / Google need to implement verification on the device - we already accept the device knows who we are. And then social media platforms should be able to have the device confirm the user is over 18 and that’s all they need to know.
This only applies if you take all those "protect the children" initiatives at face value. It seems to me that the actual reasons are different. Governments want to police speech online and be able to arrest people who say things they don't approve of, so they are pushing platforms to collect user's PID. Some also want to discourage people from doing things they don't want them to do but that are politically unfeasibl…