The Discord Age Assurance Update: Why it is a Horrible Idea to Verify Your Account.

By: Kenneth H.

After over 2 decades of their modern existence, I’m sure everyone knows what social media is and uses some form of it in their day-to-day life. Though for those that don’t or those too young to know it’s a website/app we use to socialize with people across the world, view hilarious videos, or advertise yourself or your brand. Now personally I was never interested in maintaining a social media page and just wanted to talk to people over topics we both enjoyed, so I started to use Discord, a server-based messaging platform.

You just find a link to a server relating to something you enjoy, and you just start chatting with other users, but the platform has always had an issue with child safety and grooming due to its simplicity. So, Discord decided that in the wake of countries across the world deciding to enforce age verification they should make age verification Global and not just region based to the ire of their user base.

Now what exactly does it look like? Beginning in March of this year all new accounts and any accounts they think belong to children are “Teen Accounts” that have stricter chat settings where you must go through an extra menu to DM people and accept friend requests, be unable to use your mic on Discord Stages, and be unable to view any 18+ material on the website which in this context refers to Servers, Channels, and Images marked 18+ by the creator/poster. This is all completely reasonable in my eyes along with other users but what if you want to do all the things Discord is restricting from Teen Accounts?

You would see the above image.

The way to verify you are an adult on Discord is to either use the “Take a Selfie” button to do a face scan that will determine if you are an adult or if that fails due any number of issues and a user is marked as a Teen you have you have the option to give them a photo of your ID.Yes, you read that right, Discord wants you to give them a copy of your GOVERNMENT ID. Discord says that none of this data will be saved but we can’t trust that a company won’t just save your IDs in plaintext or will then sell the “selfies” to an AI surveillance firm like Palantir or a cheap start up. We especially can’t trust Discord with this data since last year there was a leak from third party Customer Service vendor called 5CA where around 70,000 USER IDS were leaked.

Discord says that going forward there won’t be another issue like this but let the number of estimated leaked IDs sink in for a moment.

This wasn’t 70,000 accounts’ information getting leaked but 70,000 individual Government IDs. That’s around the same number of people who live in Schenectady, NY.

And then imagine how many IDs Discord will receive when their Age Assurance system goes global. Can you trust that there won’t be another leak like this in the future? My fellow users didn’t when I asked them their opinion of the Age Assurance system.

One told me on the topic of Discord’s system that: “It’s bad I get why some people would want it but it’s just a breach in privacy.”

While another said: “This is quite frankly the worst methodology for doing age verification. It’s not only risky, but a potential breach of privacy. This whole thing is also incredibly easy to bypass as you don’t even need to use your own face to verify. With this whole thing too, it spits in the face of legacy/older users because it ignores the whole “when account was made” section of a profile.”

Is this really protecting kids?

Because the user brought up something quite interesting too since it’s only asking for an ID or a face so a child could just have a parent do the selfie or just steal their ID. Now that parent’s information is at risk without them even really knowing about it and that child is now marked as an adult on Discord.

This doesn’t even cover how this protects literally no child on the platform since Teen Accounts can still DM and Friend other users on the platform and predators can easily say they’re a child with the account literally saying that.

Overall, users should follow the tried-and-true method of internet safety and never share any personal information on or with these platforms since you never know who will have access to it. Stay safe out there people.