The only way to get around this would be to verify your age, which Discord says can be accomplished in one of two ways. The first is to “submit a form of identification” to Discord vendors (i.e. scan your physical ID), or to use “facial age estimation.” Discord says that the latter process happens fully on-device, as “video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user’s device.” For ID scans, Discord says that documents “are deleted quickly.”
Between the features that are limiting being almost entirely things I don’t want anyway (random friend invites are literally just fucking scams and ads to begin with), and the entire process being completed on-device… What is this, some slow news day? Everyone is losing their minds about this being some insane overstep like Discord is asking for a blood sample, or even a photo of your driver’s license.
Don’t get me wrong, fuck this age verification nonsense, but it’s pretty clear this is some very specific government regulatory appeasement where Discord is attempting to avoid culpability for holding data at basically every juncture possible. They already have the useful, farmable data, like geolocation, age/gender demographics and interests. They don’t want our government ID. They only want a “yes” or “no” from their app.
Must be a slow news day. Everyone’s blowing this up in headlines for cheap clicks.
Don’t get me wrong, fuck this age verification nonsense, but it’s pretty clear this is some very specific government regulatory appeasement where Discord is attempting to avoid culpability for holding data at basically every joint possible.
That’s 100% what it is. It also sincerely makes me not want to use Discord, because even if this is what governments want, it’s extremely bad for users.
I’m waiting for some government to outlaw collecting the information in general outside of official government agencies. I would love to see big tech squirm as they try to figure out a valid way to harvest the data in one country, but prevent it in another.
Honestly it sounds like an amazing way to rack of fine money due to violation notices.
That’s fine if that’s your personal response. This still feels like a misdirected and ultimately useless response though.
This is a government-created problem. Are we expecting widespread boycotts of Discord to change the government’s mind? Of course not.
If it’s extremely bad for users, then users need to change their government. Yeah, yeah, I know the excuses for not doing that, they don’t listen, we are all powerless, it is the way it is, yadda yadda. It’s a lie. We are powerful, they want us feeling powerless so we can’t challenge them. Fuck that, challenge them. Government exists to represent us, it can exist in perpetuity only with our active and ongoing consent and participation. If people in totalitarian countries can overthrow their governments, so can we, we don’t have to do it overnight, we don’t have to do it over this one single isolated issue, but we can at least start working against them, eroding the structures that support them. Fuck governments like these, figure out ways to twist their arm, make things more difficult for them, and eventually, if we keep at it, we’ll get what we want. We hold the power here, not them. We decide what kind of society we want to live in. We need to stop abdicating our responsibilities as citizens and actively fight against this shit.
By all means, challenge your government, but I’m not going to upload my ID to a database to use Discord. I can self host a thing that will accomplish the same goals without doing something that stupid.
That’s fine, and I hate Discord’s general situation too, and I can’t wait for a properly federated self-hostable open source alternative to take off. But it just seems a bit knee-jerk or straw that broke the camel’s back to throw Discord under the bus specifically for this. To be clear, you don’t actually need to provide ID, you can either continue using a limited account (it’s barely limited at all in any serious way unless you’re using Discord for NSFW stuff) or you can attempt to validate your face with a camera instead, which supposedly happens completely on-device. Either one is a totally reasonable alternative.
If you believe that photo validation lives entirely on your device, you might be surprised by how many times the tech industry straight up lies about this kind of stuff, but I don’t trust that for a minute.
I might consider the facial verification thing if someone fulfills a security audit that both verifies the photo is never sent, encrypted or not, and it does not stay on the device’s drive.
But yeah, part of me hopes some number of privacy focused companies will just abandon business in these locations and claim “It’s only a matter of time before they reverse course for security failures, we will just wait until then.”
Between the features that are limiting being almost entirely things I don’t want anyway (random friend invites are literally just fucking scams and ads to begin with), and the entire process being completed on-device… What is this, some slow news day? Everyone is losing their minds about this being some insane overstep like Discord is asking for a blood sample, or even a photo of your driver’s license.
Don’t get me wrong, fuck this age verification nonsense, but it’s pretty clear this is some very specific government regulatory appeasement where Discord is attempting to avoid culpability for holding data at basically every juncture possible. They already have the useful, farmable data, like geolocation, age/gender demographics and interests. They don’t want our government ID. They only want a “yes” or “no” from their app.
Must be a slow news day. Everyone’s blowing this up in headlines for cheap clicks.
That’s 100% what it is. It also sincerely makes me not want to use Discord, because even if this is what governments want, it’s extremely bad for users.
I’m waiting for some government to outlaw collecting the information in general outside of official government agencies. I would love to see big tech squirm as they try to figure out a valid way to harvest the data in one country, but prevent it in another.
Honestly it sounds like an amazing way to rack of fine money due to violation notices.
That’s fine if that’s your personal response. This still feels like a misdirected and ultimately useless response though.
This is a government-created problem. Are we expecting widespread boycotts of Discord to change the government’s mind? Of course not.
If it’s extremely bad for users, then users need to change their government. Yeah, yeah, I know the excuses for not doing that, they don’t listen, we are all powerless, it is the way it is, yadda yadda. It’s a lie. We are powerful, they want us feeling powerless so we can’t challenge them. Fuck that, challenge them. Government exists to represent us, it can exist in perpetuity only with our active and ongoing consent and participation. If people in totalitarian countries can overthrow their governments, so can we, we don’t have to do it overnight, we don’t have to do it over this one single isolated issue, but we can at least start working against them, eroding the structures that support them. Fuck governments like these, figure out ways to twist their arm, make things more difficult for them, and eventually, if we keep at it, we’ll get what we want. We hold the power here, not them. We decide what kind of society we want to live in. We need to stop abdicating our responsibilities as citizens and actively fight against this shit.
By all means, challenge your government, but I’m not going to upload my ID to a database to use Discord. I can self host a thing that will accomplish the same goals without doing something that stupid.
That’s fine, and I hate Discord’s general situation too, and I can’t wait for a properly federated self-hostable open source alternative to take off. But it just seems a bit knee-jerk or straw that broke the camel’s back to throw Discord under the bus specifically for this. To be clear, you don’t actually need to provide ID, you can either continue using a limited account (it’s barely limited at all in any serious way unless you’re using Discord for NSFW stuff) or you can attempt to validate your face with a camera instead, which supposedly happens completely on-device. Either one is a totally reasonable alternative.
If you believe that photo validation lives entirely on your device, you might be surprised by how many times the tech industry straight up lies about this kind of stuff, but I don’t trust that for a minute.
I might consider the facial verification thing if someone fulfills a security audit that both verifies the photo is never sent, encrypted or not, and it does not stay on the device’s drive.
But yeah, part of me hopes some number of privacy focused companies will just abandon business in these locations and claim “It’s only a matter of time before they reverse course for security failures, we will just wait until then.”