discord's age verification

Hello!

Discord is rumored to be up for an initial public offering. As is tradition, the company is doing everything it can to improve revenue numbers to impress our feudal lords who will be evaluating it on the stock market. The details on exactly what is going to happen and when are a little muddy given the company's response to the backlash has been damage control claims about who will need to verify and to delay the rollout until the second half of 2026.

For now, let's take a look at some of the claims on Discord's FAQ page.

"Most users never access age-restricted content or change their default safety settings. For those who do, we have an internal system that determines your age using account-level signals — like how long your account has existed, whether you have a payment method on file, and general patterns of account activity. It does not read your messages, analyze your conversations, or look at the content you post."

I don't think the existence of a system that verifies age based on data collection is much better. While under no circumstances do you "gotta hand it to em," let's assume we can trust Discord now and in the future with not selling or using your data for any other purpose. There's a metaphor I would like to introduce you to: Data is radioactive. If you decide to collect data, even in a seemingly insignificant way, you assume a massive responsibility when it comes to storing and disposing of it. Consider the story of a French power company that decided to upgrade their customers' power meters to internet enabled devices. These 'smart-meters' collected electricity usage statistics for a home and with this data one could infer which homes had routine changes during Ramadan. The power company was now inadvertently in possession of a registry of every muslim household under their service.

I don't trust companies with data. Even if policies are good there's no guarantee they will continue to be in the future and there's no guarantee your information won't end up exposed in one of the data breaches that now occur regularly.

"If you're among the less than 10% of users who do need to verify, we'll give you options — designed to tell us only your age and never your identity."

"We're adding more verification options."

See the above.

We're committed to vendor transparency.

It remains to be seen which company Discord will partner with for their face-scan age verification going forward, but it's worth noting that their first choice was Persona. The age verification software they provided Discord performs 269 distinct references between internet and government sources for potential matches to individuals of interest. Persona is also backed by Peter Thiel, founder of global surveillance company Palantir. Palantir is a company that provides automated data collection and analysis tools to various government agencies, militaries and corporations.

Here is a small collection of the weird shit Peter Thiel has said.

"I'm looking into parabiosis stuff, which I think is really interesting. This is where they did the young blood into older mice and they found that had a massive rejuvenating effect,"

"Palantir is here to disrupt, [...] And, when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them."

the context makes this next one worse i promise

"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."

Discord has dropped the partnership with Persona after backlash, but their first choice does not inspire confidence in me. I've been looking at alternatives (stoat.chat looks promising) in the likely case I need to move my personal conversations off of the platform, but there is essentially no company I trust given the growing surveillance legislation to handle my data responsibly and to not wreck their service once enough people are dependent on it. My personal pipe dream is that open source projects that provide self hostable alternatives for things that people normally default to 'cloud' services for will become more popular. I understand these solutions are way too much to ask of anyone who isn't already interested in software, but it's hard for me to imagine a real solution to the problem of 'owning' your own data that doesn't rely on trusting a company or government. I've grown increasingly skeptical of software that cannot be audited publicly. I sincerely hope this push for age verification crawls back into the hole from which it emerged. There are people doing good work both to dig up the funding for these bills and spread awareness of harm these laws are doing.

Thank you for getting to the end :). If you have anything to share or want to discuss, feel free to scan your face so can you use the shiny new comment section under each post. Take care.