Discord faces backlash over age verification

The new measures are set to come into force in March

Discord, the online communication platform beloved of gamers and chat groups around the world, is experiencing a severe backlash over its rollout of age assurance requirements.

Discord has already introduced age assurance for some users in the UK and Australia to comply with the former’s Online Safety Act and the social media ban on under-16s in the latter.

In a blog post the company explained its “Teen By Default” age assurance measures, which it is rolling out globally, as being about child safety and also to pre-empt similar measures being mulled in Europe, Canada and elsewhere to restrict access to certain content by under 18s. Other platforms including YouTube and Roblox are making similar moves.

However, Discord’s cause is not helped by the fact that identity data pertaining to 70,000 users were hacked in an attack on a third party provider, identified by Discord as 5CA, just five months ago.

While the company states that in its new system identities such as selfies and pictures never leave the device, with all processing to estimate the person’s age being performed on their smartphone, trust has been lost.

Users fear that their sensitive information will be lost in a Wild West of third party providers, all of which are prime targets for hackers, and promises by Discord to delete all IDs as soon as they were verified proved ineffective against the hackers.

Others have voiced their concerns about sale of their personal data to advertisers, processing of their biometrics by unverified third parties, behavioural profiling and more general surveillance by governments and corporations.

“Uploading your face and/or ID to the internet is basically going, ‘please steal my identity and ruin my life. I'm literally asking for it’," commented one user on Reddit.

Another said: “As a Millennial, it's been wild to watch the narrative around the internet develop over the last 20-30 years. We went from ‘Never use your real name online. Never talk to strangers online. Never post a face photo online' to 'you must upload your legal name/face data to the internet in order to talk to strangers’."

The new measures are set to come into force in March. Alongside age assurance options involving video selfies and official documents, Discord will use an AI-based system in the background to infer users’ ages based on their activity.

Thanks to the network effect and lack of like-for-like replacements, it's likely that most current users will remain on Discord although the company concedes that it expects its numbers to drop in the short term.

Non-age-gated alternatives being investigated by disgruntled gamers and chatroom denizens include Matrix, Stoat, Mumble, Slack, TeamSpeak, Steam and Gather Communities.

Update: A Discord spokesperson said that since the 5CA hack the company has reviewed its threat detection systems and security controls for third-party support providers and does not permanently store personal identity documents or users’ video selfies.

“Identity documents, including selfies, are deleted once a user’s age group is confirmed, and the selfie video used for facial age estimation never leaves their device. We’ve also continued frequent audits of our third-party systems to ensure they meet our security and privacy standards. This specific third-party vendor is not being used for age assurance.”