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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

#921

Post by zigman1 »

ghm2199 wrote: post #918

What I don't understand is why not have designated actors/ombudsman like notaries in the society that can verify your age/id without anyone knowing what it's for. 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 appr…

Eu actually plans to introduce something similar through its EUDIW initiative. It will be a digital wallet focusing on privacy preservance and user control over attributes that are shared.

It will take some time tho before it is successfully implemented.

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

#922

Post by 827a »

This might be an unpopular opinion, but imo this is a directionally correct decision from Discord. I feel that it's important that there exist privacy preserving, anonymous communication platforms; not that every platform must have or must not have these qualities.

Platforms need to adapt to how they're used (or how they want to be used). The amount of child exploitation that happens on Discord should make any civilized person working in that company uncomfortable, and its natural and good to want to do something about it, not out of external or governmental pressure, but because you yourself can see the dashboards and logs, and can see what's happening.

There's a needle of difference between a government mandating identity verification, and a private organization saying this is how we want to run our company. Threading that needle is living in a free and safe society. If we can't thread it, and we fall to one side or the other, then you have to choose whether you prefer safety or freedom. Personally, I'd rather have both.

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

#923

Post by drstewart »

pocksuppet wrote: post #637
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…

> Given current events in the USA Don't worry - they're repealing section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The one that says platforms aren't liable for what their users post. This means there will be no platforms at all very soon.

>Don't worry

I'm not worried. We'll use Zulip which has values and thus takes responsibility for everything its users post, right?

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

#924

Post by kobalsky »

jonplackett wrote: post #861

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.

jumping from the frying pan straight into the fire.

why on earth would you give Google or Apple more attestation power and control.

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

#925

Post by spragl »

pbmonster wrote: post #853
spragl wrote: 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…

How difficult would it be to add further anonymization? Let's say I want to prevent the bike shop from building a usage profile on the basis of the age check (e.g. because I'm buying booze). Would I just need to get more chains from Alice, or is there an easy way to integrate e.g. group signatures into the scheme?

I think the way to go would be for Alice to give you lots of commitments. They are computationally light-weight to generate anyway.

That would at least be a good and also simple solution. Maybe there is a perfect solution, but then I dont know it.

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

#926

Post by PsycoRobot »

It took so long to have a decision like that from Discord. I use Discord everyday and I know that a lot of teenagers use it and I think a decision like that can help to keep safe these teenagers from the internet. When last year Discord introduced that AI face scanning I thought that it was a serious problem for the security of our data but if, as they say, they remove all of the data of the ID extimation.. why not?

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

#927

Post by Lambdanaut »

mdavidn wrote: post #460
anon_cow1111 wrote: post #239

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.

It boggles my mind that they need a photo ID to prove that my 9-year-old account with a saved credit card belongs to an adult. The linked Steam account is 18 years old.

from the article:

`For most adults, age verification won’t be required, as Discord’s age inference model uses account information such as account tenure, device and activity data, and aggregated, high-level patterns across Discord communities. Discord does not use private messages or any message content in this process`

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

#928

Post by nemomarx »

PsycoRobot wrote: post #926

It took so long to have a decision like that from Discord. I use Discord everyday and I know that a lot of teenagers use it and I think a decision like that can help to keep safe these teenagers from the internet. When last year Discord introduced that AI face scanning I thought that it was a serious problem for the security of our data but if, as they say, they remove all of the data of the ID extimation.. why not?

People are pretty skeptical that discord will actually delete it (because they had a data breach showing a lot of undeleted face scans and id pictures already) or that their partner organization who does the validation won't just save it instead.

Also I don't really think this solves the grooming issue - it stops them from going in certain channels or getting pictures from non friends but an adult who wants to get past that to get to kids probably will. You'd really want like "teen only" servers with verification going the other way, if anything. I've never seen that proposed oddly

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

#929

Post by [deleted] »

safety1st wrote: post #768
anon_cow1111 wrote: post #239

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.

I'm sure I'm in the minority here, but I read the announcement and other than the risk of a slippery slope into more invasive ID demands, I'm not sure I have a huge problem with it. The default experience will be the "teen" experience - they list what that entails - stuff that's flagged as adult/NSFW/etc. is blurred out until your age is verified, which for most(?) people will require ID or face scan. DMs/friend requ…

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