An update on how we confirm your age group on Discord
discord.com58 points by meetpateltech 3 hours ago
58 points by meetpateltech 3 hours ago
IRC plus GNU Jami are still freedom respecting zones! I sincerely hope all this age verification crap causes cypherpunk FOSS solutions to grow in popularity.
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.
Still required to use a video or ID card in the UK.
There was a brief window where you could submit fake biometrics through a third-party site to verify age on Discord, pretty sure I got the link from hackernews.
That made me feel better that Discord didn't need to store my ID or video of my face, and was only storing the results of some analysis and not the inputs.
I actually like their implementation. I'm curious if it will be enough for governments, but it is nice that they are trying to persue a path without id checks
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.
This proposed solution does however allow quite liberal access to discord without confirming the age. If the implementation is as worded; then i would not see a reason to confirm my age at all.
The issue comes down to if governments accept such a (urgh) comparatively lax implementation. It's pretty clear to me that the primary purpose of these laws are entirely to... force all citizens to identify themselves across the internet for the purpose of profile building, and nothing to do with child safety.
So as implementations go; this one is pretty decent. We should stop governments from passing these darn laws though.
If the account age estimation puts you in adult, it sounds like you don't need to do any of those?
I'd like to see details about their model there, but account age is at least better than a lot of systems like steam are doing for this.
Some of those details are available here: https://discord.com/safety/how-discord-estimates-age-without...
They should not be trying to implement it globally. That is unacceptable.
I like that the dialog indicates the service provider. Thumbs up for transparency.
> "Rather than waiting to be told how to do it, we’re launching our own..."
Translation: we've found an excuse to hold our captive users hostage for their monetizable personal information, and we're leaping at the opportunity. Nothing obligates us to demand this data, but we deeply covet it.
> "We're launching this over the course of this week, so it may take a few days to..."
Translation: we'd like to limit the PR impact of our hostile acts by staggering them temporally, so that our users can't effectively coordinate social media protests.