I totally agree. At the same time, nobody should be using Discord anyway, for a variety of reasons. They're one of the least trustworthy online platforms I can think of, and have unfortunately encouraged online ecosystems where you have to "Join our Discord" in order to maybe be heard. I would be delighted if age verification encourage more people to abandon Discord. In a better world, companies like that wouldn't be allowed to become zombie corporations but instead be forced to go out of business.

> it provides an easier way for pedophiles to identify underage users and provides more doxable information.

Do you have any basis for assuming that that users who are under 18 will have that information revealed to other users? That’s not what I read in this article.

I also think you’re being quite prescriptive about a private commercial service. You’re entitled to your opinion, of course, but companies enact restrictions to their products and services not required by law all the time.

If Discord wants to make their service require a mandatory declaration of allegiance to the Klingon empire, they’re allowed to do that.

There are several jurisdictions that require companies to ensure that age limits are not bypassed via VPN or anonymizers. This puts the companies in a catch-22, block all VPN and anonymizers access, restricting many people with no recourse, or applying the age rules unilaterally, restricting some teens, but giving recourse to adults using VPNs.

It is not, as you say, "a risk to the privacy and safety of all users", but rather just those marked as needing to verify.

Your hyperbolic rant is uninformed and tiring.

irc + jitsi. The only options are things incapable of complying to this fucktardedness

Well, there's a lot more low-hanging fruit there to be had.

It was sadly too trivial using various Discord search engines to find things like BDSM servers advertising to "14-28 year olds", or ones where minors openly sell NSFW content.

Discord as a whole is oftentimes enabling the communities to prey on those users, not just making the users more identifiable.

i dont like it, but.... its their platform. Dont like it, dont use it.

I think i'm going to run down the dont use it path, which is a shame, because i do use it atm.

Given Persona is involved (and thus also Thiel and Palantir) expect everything to be store for ever, sold for profit and misused agains you in the worst way possible.

Discord offers age verification via AgeKey [1]. Reading their privacy policy, one can create multiple AgeKeys based on the same identification or face scan. Each AgeKey is stored as a passkey and not persisted anywhere else. The privacy policy indicates that the identification information is submitted to 3rd party providers, and also appears to be used for general internet company marketing and promotions, similarly invasive to buying a pair of shoes online. That is, your identity will be propagated to ad networks by AgeKey as it similarly does for ecommerce.

Discord cannot determine identity from the AgeKey.

1. https://agekey.org/

>The question here is, does Discord do the same thing for any or all of the selected options? Or is identity data full well and truly purged once the outcome is determined - no hashing, nothing retained other than the result?

What they actually do is irrelevant since none of these companies should ever be trusted to do what they claim they will do.

They will also likely dial up the sensitivity of the system over time. Maybe initially 90% of users are let through without doxxing themselves, like Discord claims. But over time, they have the knob to turn up the sensitivity to get more verifications so eventually everyone is verified. They love to exploit the network effect of making people think they're missing out while all their friends are in, exact same strategy they've used for years with the sudden demand for phone numbers on good standing accounts.

What? No. It’s just one week. If anything it’d prolong the outrage. Gradual rollouts are what responsible development teams do. When did this stop being Hacker News?

Just remember that systemd added age verification in Linux without anyone asking.

There are freedom respecting Linux projects, but those lead by redhat\ibm employees (past and present) don't.

It won't. Most people don't care about privacy or FOSS. I've been trying to get my friends to switch to something else for years, and they couldn't care less.

ID verification is the least of my worries, to be honest. I've been on the internet long enough to acknowledge a need for something like that. I'm uncomfortable with the fact that data is a valuable commodity now. Discord is storing my online habits and conversations somewhere on their servers. Deleting that information is deleting money.

If people weren't worried about that before, then they certainly won't care now.

Matrix has become invaluable for dozens of my hacker friends. We ditched Discord almost a year ago and we have no desire to go back. Besides having high quality e2ee voice/video/screensharing (thanks LiveKit), we collectively spend 10x less for the functionality and keep our data in Switzerland. No ads, no one getting their accounts hacked with QR codes, ultra-granular space/channel settings, multiple choices for client implementations, and end to end encryption enables sensitive discussions that would have previously been curtailed. The identity verification is greatly appreciated although our new users do have some issues getting set up with multiple devices, but it's no more complicated than multi-device WhatsApp. Matrix is ready for prime time.

When the social media ban went into effect in Australia last year, kids were submitting photos of their parents and dogs to get around the verification. Not sure how better or worse they've gotten, but the old adage of trying to keep things from kids only motivates them more to get around the limitations you put up.

For reference: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/dog-photos-vpns-fake-ids-how...

Yep, still waiting to see if they disqualify those old determinations.

All the available paths turn into:

- give us your ID

- give us your biometrics

- give somebody, not necessarily Discord, a valid credit card

That's sll of the paths.

They should not be trying to implement it globally. That is unacceptable.

A friend of mine, who lives in the UK, says that he's been offered the credit-card verification option.

"Most people?" Do you have a source for that claim?