Discord age verification

[firecat]

I guess Discord is going to start requiring users to prove they are over a certain age if they want to access certain content.

I mainly use Discord to keep connected to fanfic fandom, most of which has certain content. And I definitely am not going to upload my ID.

Does this affect you? If so, what are you going to do when it goes into effect?

Comments

[sraun]

A few things:

It is almost certainly the case that Discord is doing the bare minimum to meet legal requirements. They're part of the group that Dreamwidth is also in that fights these kinds of requirements.

They're claiming that for many/most people they'll be able to establish age good enough to be classified as 'not minors' from your previous postings.

They also claim that the facial age verification is going to live completely on your local machine - your picture is not going to get uploaded to their servers. It will be interesting to see how this works, because if it's not live, it opens the possibility of using artifically-aged photos.

[sraun]

Oh, one other thing - reports from some UK and Australia users (where this is already happening) report that getting around it can be as easy as 'rename a channel with nsfw in the name to something without nsfw'.

[shanaqui]

This is not a universal panacea, unfortunately. My wife was blocked from seeing fanart I posted in a channel called "general" which has no explicit terms in the file name or anything. It's a server with only the two of us in it, no channels marked as NSFW at all.

Age verification always happening solely on your device is a lie that they use to make it sound palatable, as proven by the leak of 70,000 people's government IDs. (Some sources claim much more data was stolen.)

[firecat]

Thanks for the details! I didn’t realize Discord is being legally required to do this. I have more hope now that I know it wasn’t their choice (although I’m not thrilled they are choosing to capitulate).