Discord has announced that they will begin demanding everyone abide by age verification starting in March.
Imagine a scenario where a company trial runs a surveillance program. In that trial, they suffer from a massive data breach and they lose that personal information to a third party. Then, that company responds to that by saying, “well, I think we have proven everything is secure. Let’s go live with this program for everyone.” It doesn’t make any sense, does it? If anything, that person, at minimum, deserves a slap up the back of the head.
If you can believe it, though, a company is more or less doing just that: Discord. As people were warning that age verification was going to open people up to having highly detailed personal information exposed to third parties, Discord proved that point after having their age verification system hacked and having at least 70,000 user government IDs exposed. Some reports suggest that number was actually into the millions of users rather than just the reported 70,000.
Either way, it proved that such information should not be collected in the first place. That was the lesson. Sadly, it seems that Discord simply didn’t learn that lesson and has decided to do exactly the polar opposite of what they should do in response to this. They have announced that they are going to force all of their users to undergo this age verification and not just a select few users. From TechCrunch:
Discord is rolling out age verification globally starting next month, the company announced on Monday. All users will be put into a “teen-appropriate experience” by default. Only users verified as adults will be able to change certain settings and access age-restricted content.
“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,” the company said in an emailed statement to TechCrunch. “Discord does not use private messages or any message content in this process.”
Some Discord users will need to be confirmed as adults in order to unblur sensitive content or turn off the setting. Only adults will be able to access age-restricted channels, servers, and app commands. Additionally, messages from people a user may not know are routed to a separate inbox by default, and only verified adults can modify this setting.
People will receive warning prompts for friend requests from users they may not know, and only adults will be able speak onstage in servers.
To complete age verification, users need to either complete a facial age estimation or submit an ID to Discord’s vendor partners. The platform plans to add more options in the future. Discord notes that some users may be asked to use multiple methods when additional information is needed to assign an age group.
I’m sure Discord is pretty damned proud that they didn’t learn the lesson the first time. It really leaves the impression that they are doing everything they can to run themselves into the ground. For users, this is definitely a case of “fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Anyone who submits their personal information to this platform knowing the reputation the company has really only has themselves to blame if that information gets compromised. Hopefully, that doesn’t happen, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it does.
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.
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