Submitted 2 weeks ago by ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.techbuzz.ai/articles/discord-walks-back-age-verification-fears-for-most-users
Too late assholes… I’m already deleting most of the posts I made on my discord and I will be migrating elsewhere soon.
This is misleading. Discord is not reversing course. It was in their original announcement that they would try to automatically determine everyone’s age and “most” people won’t need to do any sort of verification.
Yes, they aren’t changing course, but Discord certainly did not say “most” in the announcement and it was a single sentence in a long article about age verification and content gating. They should have been far more upfront about their inference method being the primary one in the first place. This was a communication issue and not a reader issue.
It’s also possible they decided to tune their inference model to be a lot more, let’s say, permissive so that there isn’t a huge backlash of people getting asked to provide ID when they’ve been using the service for nearly a decade or longer.
What you mean there clear and comprehensive announcement? Yeah that didn’t happen, this is on them.
They still haven’t really provided any information. They say most users won’t have to verify, how many is “most”.
Agree headline is misleading. “Walking Back” implies reversing course, that is not happening.
Plus we all know how great AI age verification is. Big empty “reassurance” there.
So they’re going to scan everything you do with AI to figure out how old you are instead. Not really better.
Not to mention, even if it proves satisfactory to the existing userbase, any new users will start with no history to draw inferences from, wouldn’t that tend to imply that any existing users unaffected are essentially “grandfathered in”, but with the same privacy concerns for everyone else in the long run?
they have already done this for at least the last year or so easily. I noticed it when I requested by data package last yea, theres a clear area on it that infers both your gender and your age in it.
They are just acting like this is a “new system” but in reality its a system that have had for awhile now, just didn’t have any public facing usage of it.
They already do this for advertising. And it is extremely accurate.
They didn’t walk back shit, they upped the stakes by saying they use your chats to analyse your age. That’s just as bad.
They were already doing that.
Every advertising company already monitors you whenever possible to determine things like your age to target ads as effectively as possible. If a isn’t relying on a third party for advertising like Google AdSense, and they’re handling it internally, they definitely know that info.
I assumed they were already doing that, after all the IPO is coming do they will be doing all they can to make money and avoid risk. Admitting it however shows they are desperate.
To think they weren’t already doing that is naive. They hold a lot of liability hosting the amount of data they do, and that’s without the obvious gain they’d have selling data.
If I used discord, they would assume I’m 7 years old.
goes back to sitting on the living room floor, and watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles while eating cereal with gummy bears added in
Jokes on you, discord! I’m 42!
They definitely know you’re 42. Kids these days don’t have the attention span for longer, plot-heavy cartoons like TMNT.
That’s why I am deleting my shit and going to delete my account.
I think the article title is technically correct. They walked back the fears that users had. You’re right that they haven’t changed their policy, and they’ve exposed themselves as being extra creepy to someone like us, but we aren’t the majority of Discord users.
I imagine the average Discord user, if they were even aware of this change at all, is breathing a sigh of relief right now, until these changes (or changes like them) actually affect those people
it is admittedly going to be a bit funny if some immature 45 year old man child gets flagged as a teen
If Discord cared about this, they’d use the same identity platforms governments use. For example, in the US, id.me is a requirement for many federal services. While it does deanonymize me and there are privacy concerns expanding this tech beyond government services, I trust id.me to take my data security seriously. It has to have federal security requirements. If their data is breached, there will be repercussions and reparations.
Discord, on the other hand, uses random vendors. There were no repercussions or reparations for the previous leak. Discord said moving forward they’d require SOC2 Type II or ISO 27001 for vendors. Crucially, neither of these certifications matter a fucking iota for personally identifiable information and Discord itself will not be completely them so even if the vendors were PII secure Discord will not hold itself to the same standards. Discord does not care about its users; Discord only cares about the ad revenue this will open up.
I don’t even trust Id.me. If the government needs to securely identify someone they should be setting it up themselves instead of us trusting some random company that used to provide coupons to soldiers.
What, and lose an opportunity to funnel tax money to private interests?
Yeah that’s a totally fair response. Lithuania did it.
I don’t even trust id.me. Why would I give my ID and photo or video to a corporation that is contracting with the Trump administration?
I thought the requirements came from the Biden admin but I’m not able to find evidence of this.
What you’re describing is the prisoner’s dilemma. In theory, none of us should interact with the current admin because if that happened they’d shut down. Of course if we did that, many federal employees and all of the contractors wouldn’t be able to feed their kids in a week or so, so it only works if we can guarantee a universal strike without scabs. But wait, we know people are actively joining ICE, so everyone with half a brain dropping government work doesn’t guarantee those without a brain won’t scab. If we have scabs, then future admin is left with a poisoned well and that existing possibly okay workforce is now on the breadline with an admin that’s not only hostile to breadlines but anyone who fights back. Don’t forget costs are currently skyrocketing for everything and electricity is about to be through the roof everywhere. In other words, many people have the choice of morals or food for their kids. Or healthcare if that resonates more.
Assuming you’re in the US, will you file your taxes this year? Since you’re not willing to give anyone contracting with the Trump asking your personal information, you’ll have to do them by hand. Even a CPA is technically doing work for the IRS who is part of the Trump admin even if he’s suing them. Are you allowing your employer to keep social security and Medicare taxes? If so, I think you might have discovered a reason why a rational person who is just trying to get by might intentionally support the Trump admin. If not, by god, you have stronger morals than I do and good luck with that jail sentence. Unfortunately, some of us have to participate in society even though we want to improve it.
Nope I don’t trust them to use a US-based service. Also I don’t think they’re even allowed to as under EU law as all data held on users must be held on EU servers, so that solution wouldn’t be a one size fits all.
If Discord cared about this, they’d use the same identity platforms governments use. For example, in the US
I don’t think there is a one-size solution which is why I said Discord should use the same platforms plural that govts use. A solution for France isn’t going to be the same solution for the US. Because Discord is not actively attempting to use solutions (again plural) that have repercussions and reparations attached, like the ones governments use that require healthy standards, it’s very clear Discord does not actually care about this problem.
If they cared about handling of PII they should require ISO 27701
Oh absolutely. More importantly Discord needs to also follow the standard, not just require it of their vendors. Granted this source is the only place I can find they’re requiring that so that might not actually be true. It kinda reads like an AI summary.
Federate or die.
Piggybacking off this:
XMPP and Deltachat are two excellent decentralized, self-hostable, federated communication platforms. Deltachat is limited more to text (though it can send videos or audio files that can be played in the app like snapchat), but with XMPP, we could use Movim, which can do group video calls, screen sharing, differing permissions in groups, and even user blogs!
And I believe the devs are working on adding discord-like channels with multiple groups under a single community.
If you have a link to a discussion or issue where they’re tracking this, I’d love to follow it.
They’ll also need to figure out how to let rooms have more than 1000 people, which is currently the limit on Movim (and it might be an XMPP limitation). Right now, Matrix seems like the only option for a Discord migration, but I hope that changes soon.
I might move my Discord community to Matrix, but I’d want a full 100% clone of the server’s history. Seems like that’s almost possible? Discord scrapers can dump a whole channel to JSON, and the Mautrix Discord bridge already make it look like real users sent bridged messages. I think with a little customization, the Mautrix bridge could be modified to import an enormous JSON file to fully mirror an entire Discord server, instead of just grabbing messages in real time.
I really hope someone works on that soon 🙏
Movim looks very promising and I haven’t heard of it before, thanks for highlighting it. My group has been working to stand up a few Prosody (XMPP) servers but as far as client side the best we could identify was Gajim. This looks better.
They still have the AI shit that looks at your posts to try and determine if you are an adult.
Fuck that.
Like everything else everyone has ever posted outside the fediverse?
There’s shitloads of AIs reading the fediverse, too.
They had it way before they announced, apparently. Because I ate a ban for apparently saying I’m 9 somewhere (I don’t actually remember posting that, I suspect a certain someone got to my account to get me banned).
Does this call even have an community relations department because they suck. Seriously what does stupid decision to just announce agey verification and then provide no additional details or context.
This clarification pathetic attempt at backpedalling, isn’t much better either, they’ve still provided essentially no information on exactly what the process is going to be, and exactly how it is going to work. I also do not like the fact that they’re basically just giving up on any attempts to implement this themselves, and are going with third party solutions. We all know that “third party solutions” means the lowest bidder, so this will be implemented poorly with no operational security, and absolutely will result in a data breach.
I created my account at least 15 years ago so if they require age verification from me they’re idiots.
Lmaoooo
Have you SEEN their UI? You know how over the past ten years we’ve been like “aaaaanny day now they’ll fix it so it isn’t awful…” And they didn’t. And instead, we just sorta… got used to it?
Pffft… like they listen to anything anybody else says. Community relations dept. Ha!
Discord’s mobile app is the worst one I’ve regularly used. I’ve never had an app that crashes from 2 gifs.
Or couldn’t accept keyboard input from the stock keyboard.
Or wouldn’t let me use the touch interface to move around because the UI got stuck, so I can’t read any channel until I restart the app.
Or wouldn’t notify you for people responding in DMs randomly.
Or have a hard time displaying videos that were uploaded to their servers.
Or keep saved and embedded gifs cached, so you didn’t have to reload them every time, wasting data and time.
Or didn’t randomly play audio from videos whenever you swiped away.
Or had the context menu require an internet connection, so if you have low data, good luck editing your messages!
DIscord: GUYs! You’ll NEVER BELIEVE THIS!!! Instead of invasively reading out every one of your personal identifications and selling the data on your likes/dislikes, we can ACTUALLY just use an AI to tell if you’re a child by how your interact with people!!!
Us: Maybe you could have the AI just stop the stalkers.
Discord:
Image
The company’s deploying AI-powered inference to estimate user ages based on behavioral patterns, account history, and other signals already in its systems. Only when that automated prediction fails or flags uncertainty will users face requests for manual verification through ID uploads or facial scanning.
Oh, so it’s even easier to game it and pretend to be “an adult”. Simply avoid any minecraft and roblox communities to be an instant adult.
Discord didn’t specify exactly what percentage constitutes a “vast majority,” nor did it detail which signals feed into its age prediction models. That lack of transparency could become its own issue as regulators increasingly scrutinize how platforms handle youth safety versus privacy rights.
Big brother is watching you masturbate, for your own good, of course.
For the subset of users who do get flagged for manual verification, Discord says it’s partnering with third-party services that specialize in age verification tech. These vendors typically process ID documents or facial scans without permanently storing biometric data, though implementation details remain vague.
It’s not permanent storage if they delete after safely selling to interested buys!
As lawmakers ramp up age verification requirements globally, expect more platforms to walk this tightrope between compliance and community trust.
I wonder if this is what might actually push more people into “host your own shit” that’s easy to shut down and migrate as needed.
They will never delete it anyway. They might park it in a different spot, sell it as well, then delete where they originally stored it. The new spot they part it might even have a degree of separation or so from the company. But they never delete information, don’t ever trust they do.
“For most users” the whole point here is to gradually get people used to having to show their papers to access the internet. We must accept nothing less than a total reversal here. Give them an inch each day and eventually they’ll have their mile.
Sorry but I’m not clicking a link ending in .ai
I’ll wait for another source.
What do you have against the British overseas territory of Anguilla? Ultra-specific geographical prejudice.
Deleting posts is just setting visibility to 0. They still exist, and you should assume they exist forever.
ImageBro it might even be worse because they gotta watch your every move to implement this shit. I’m moving to fluxer.app
I’ve not seen anyone mention fluxer before, have you been using it long, is it as good as their website claims? Seems strange no one else has mentioned it in many of the discord replacement threads going around if its as good as the website makes it sound.
Its amazing bro for real, if you want you can join our community and see how good that is with your own eyes
I’m afraid Fluxer might snap and turn money chasers too. Buy until they do, I might try it.
There is also GameVox
I think their business model is sustainable without massive privacy breaches like discord did in order to satisfy the investors. Its nice because its a really indipendent service that’s also planning to add the ability for everyone to host their own decentraluized servers
Do you want to join the community i am building with a friend? Its a community about the fediverse
They were watching already… Feeding it through an AI changes nearly nothing…
I don’t believe them lol.
Like all other social media sites, they’ll postpone it and bring it back when all the uproar settles.
What happens when the lie? Nothing. If they say they will delete something, but they keep it, nothing will happen to them. So of course they will keep all the information. Maybe shuffle it from here to there and then delete here.
So they haven’t walked anything back, they’re just adding in a motherfucking clanker as a middleman. What could go wrong?
Big corporations have absolutely laid waste to the internet. There’s nothing left unspoiled at this point.
Until they walk back the walkback.
Incremental rollouts has a successful track record :<
?? You don’t get to walk back my fears. You can walk back the source, but you don’t get to say “nevermind, you’re not worried about this”.
They haven’t though.
They’ve just restated the exact same thing but then added on hollow empty promises of “this time we’ll be better, I swear!”
They aren’t walking back anything. They just repeated their claim, that “most people won’t even have to give their IDs, because our AI will read all your messages and decide if you’re 18”
Oh look, so they’re saying they’re already training ai on all the data they have on us? Yeah I feel my privacy being so respected.
The cat has been let out of the bag. I’m still moving somewhere else once I figured out where with friends.
migrate to matrix.
I’ll be honest, The UK introduced these age verification and ID issues and many places were forced to follow suit. Discord being one of them and I’m sure at somepoint it did pop up but I’ve never signed up for it and I’ve continued to use the software without issue.
My Xbox demands to see my ID so I cancelled my Subscription. If discord starts demanding it I’ll be moving back to Teamspeak or Mumble.
I left as soon as I saw something asking for age verification in the client.
hold up.
so y’all took the two hottest takes in online culture right now and decided to do both of them?
what the actual fuck is wrong with people these days. it’s almost like everyone in silicon valley is fucking delusional.
so we’re going to invade your right to privacy and scan your identity then sell it to 3rd parties. oh, that’s not acceptable? well I guess we could have AI profile you and then we still sell your identity to 3rd parties. fuck me you say? shockedpikachu.jpg
Never really used discord in the first place. I tried to join a few support threads for random gizmos that had no forums but realized that its a terrible place for support compared to forums. The whole UI was just chaotic to me as well.
Yep. Too late, i fucking deleted that shit without hesitation or regret.
Yeah, so, “most users” won’t have to post video selfies or their ID, but you’ll still have to accept active spyware feeding information to an AI model that checks all your activity.
This is still equally as bad.
Novis@lemdro.id 2 weeks ago
People need to realize that this isn’t JUST a Discord issue. This is a policy issue AS WELL. Fucking pay attention to the politics around you. And this isn’t just a United States issue as well.
tyler@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
I’m just going to repeat myself for the hundredth time here. This is exactly what happens when you define words in such broad terms. Social media does not include things like discord. It doesn’t include Reddit, it doesn’t include Lemmy. But because so many damn people just refer to any site that they can talk with other people on as social media, it became enshrined in law and now literally every service you touch is legally defined as social media.
This is not hyperbole; with the current definitions across numerous countries, Amazon (the place where you buy things, not other services like games) is legally defined as social media.
Words mean things and when words are hijacked for other purposes it allows governments to strip away your rights without you realizing.
ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Okay, I’m gonna ask: why is reddit not social media?
DomeGuy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Words don’t have meanings. Meanings have words.
Amazon the internet megastore allows non-employees of Amazon to add content to their store. Both as supposed vendors offering goods for services and as customers giving reviews and ratings to such store listings. And Amazon chooses what listings to show to users through opaque algorithms.
Can you give an example of the sort of regulation a social media site should need to follow which Amazon should be exempt from? Or the sort of rule that should bind reddit and Facebook but not Amazon?
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I vote for this guy for president.
I grew up with certain words meaning certain things. Then I get older, and suddenly, those words are gone, new words exist, old words mean new things, medical terms are now no longer medical terms and just purely an insult derived from a definition that didn’t used to define the root word. Pluto isn’t a planet. Instead of 9 planets, there are now an unknown number at least in the thousands. There’s like 4 other Earths.
Language shouldn’t change over time. It can adapt, but I should know that grass is green. Not grass is plubertatude. A word I just made up for the demonstration of absurdity. Nothing wrong with grass being green.
Novis@lemdro.id 2 weeks ago
So I kinda walked away from this to think about what’s being said a bit and I just kinda have to disagree? Like, being clear and concise and accurate in defining something is hella important… to the people that care about those things. The thing we see though isn’t lacking definitions, especially in a legal sense, but people not pushing back enough whenever bad actors start bringing up terrible arguments. There are people out there that you can bring up the best, most logical points in the world and they will still twist and twist and twist until your original point is lost. We can make the most robust, perfect definitions and some people will STILL either find ways around it or completely ignore what was rationally established. The definition doesn’t matter, the problem is fascists want to monitor the world and make whoever they want disappear and people kinda just let it happen.
And to be clear, I’m trying to say you’re completely wrong. Defining things is important to establish a shared common framework of understanding and policy making and regulations are SO SO SO IMPORTANT cause they save lives in more than just one way, but problem isn’t clear cut to be solved with “we need to define things better.” We have a culture issue. Culture issues need more than one approach to resolve.
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
I define my dick to be broad. I declared it, and thus have manifested it into reality.
Spaniard@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I disagree. By definition social media is “a site that facitilates the creation, sharing and aggregation of content amongst virtual communities and networks” so Reddit and Lemmy are social networks.
Lfrith@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Chat control was one of the most notable signs that this is an issue around the world with it still popping up over and over in the EU. This is a global fight.