Discord has announced that it's rolling out age verification checks globally from March – and the decision has sparked fury from many privacy-conscious users.
I hate all age verification checks, I even hate Steam’s when they present me that dumb number drop list before I see a game’s store page based on its content. If you know my age, you don’t need to ever fucking ask me. If I’ve told you, with a straight face and no malicious intent that “I’m over 30” “I’m over 30” “I’m over 30” then STOP ASKING ME FOR MY AGE!!
Now something I don’t see some people talk about is that, there are people out there who have lied about their age. It’s nothing new. You’ve done it. I’ve done it. We’ve collectively been building a platform for this to eventually be coming and we’re paying some of that price.
With Discord going Public in March and this rolling out in March, it goes hand and hand.
Steam asking you Everytime means they ACTUALLY are deleting private details you give them, and only store them locally so you have full control over how long they know.
This is literally the fucking exact ideal way this should be handled. Why the fuck would you be upset over literally the most consumer way possible to handle age verification.
No one sane is going to pretend we don’t need some form of verification. Even if it is just lip service for legal purposes. 10 year olds should a have at least a check to be like hay this isn’t for you ask Mom and dad first. So parents can also be aware there IS something for them to be aware of.
You can’t expect parents to be omniscient after all.
So having companies actually respect data privacy and control, and give appropriate warnings is literally exactly what we want.
Actually, if it would be possible to somehow ask parents beforehand, it probably would be perfect.
Say, you register an internet connection and sign an email that will receive requests from DNS upon visiting explicit sites. Whenever you visit these sites, you get an email with a “Confirm” button. Let’s say it has 1 hour cooldown before sending request for the same domain again. In case your child dials up pornhub, you have a choice + you know they are trying to access something meant for adults.
As for open access points, they already been using DNS sinkholes and are totally not for NSFW stuff anyway, so all access denied by default.
No ID needed aside of signing up for an internet connection which already requires an ID anyway. Everyone is happy. No idea if it is possible.
They are not though, deleting the information. They are just not keeping it in that part of the system.
Anytime you think they are deleting your information, ask yourself, is that information valuable to them? The answer is always yes. Then ask, why would they delete it? Why would they not keep it secretly or otherwise? They would, they always do.
Which doesn’t even address the point that other interests got that information when you gave it to steam. You verifying your age is information the national security state would sweep up, but possibly others, to say nothing of hackers targeting the company holding the data. Some of whom are the national security state.
Because it’s like asking you for an ID to purchase alcohol. And you’re standing there with a full beard, some wrinkles in your skin and having an aged look. It’s insulting.
But I guess you wouldn’t know that because OMGVALVE!!
Oh no, I pissed off the angry little children and their alts. What won’t I do? :(
Tangential, but if it is enforced (alchohol has good reason to do so) it should be enforced impartially regardless of how you look, otherwise it’s discrimination. My comment is based on my Asian looking experience.
so… you do want face verification for online interactions?
edit:
In-person, for a “regulated” substance - it seems reasonable to require that proof be checked as part of policy, regardless of appearance. There’s no storage (in most cases) and the cashier is the only one who looks at the ID and they are supposed to do it to keep their job. The only place I’ve seen recently where your ID is actually tracked is stuff like sudafed, where buying too much makes you a potential meth maker.
Online, the rule has been “trust me, bro” forever. There’s no person testing you, aside from maybe a paywall to ensure you have a credit card as an age check. Steam is doing the online equivalent of minimal validation and minimal retention that the booze store is.
Anytime they scan your id the information is stored. They know you went into that store and bought alcohol. If you think they aren’t storing that information, I’ve an exciting investment opportunity for you.
It doesn’t matter if the schlepps at the store don’t see the information stored and don’t retain a record, obviously they wouldn’t.
I hear that. My local ABC store doesn’t scan my ID, though I don’t see a future where they don’t eventually scan every time; and my local grocery store scans occasionally, but not always.
I can’t just not buy age-verified products, though, because sometimes it’s cold medicine or a prescription. **
Back to the original thread, this is not a Discord problem, this is a privacy problem. We need to push back on data capture in general and tell legislators that privacy is important to all people, even those who buy booze.
** could we make little sneaky stickers that obfuscate the barcode enough to prevent it scanning? The cashier would likely revert to visual inspection without the data retention: face matches photo, age is good, override.
What bothers me that people are outraged as if Discord would lock everyone out until they prove their age. As far as I can see, age verification is not mandatory unless you want to engage in 18+ channels. No major changes besides some friend invites warnings, blurred age restricted content and some other things.
I like your point about that nobody talks about children lying they are 18+. So far there are no way to restrict them from engaging in adult chatrooms. Discord has a insane reputation for being a cesspool of pedophilia and exposure to adult content to children. Shit ton of people talked about it. And now, when Discord decided to actually do something about it - major buzz against it.
Noting will change to any user if they use Discord to chat and play with friends. What will change is a mandatory verification for people who visit explicit groups and channels marked as 18+ content. No more, no less.
As you have mentioned, they are protecting themselves before going public.
I use discord to chat and play with friends, many servers have an nsfw channel to share things that you probably don’t want to suddenly be on your phone screen in public. It will also filter images in dms.
It’s not the end of the world, but it’s ineffective at tackling the actual problem, if anything adds appeal by making content “forbidden”. I’m certainly cancelling my cheap nitro I’ve had for a while because I’m not giving any company arbitrarily implementing identity verification any of my money.
I’ll also probably look into setting up my own matrix server later…
I use discord to chat and play with friends, many servers have an nsfw channel to share things that you probably don’t want to suddenly be on your phone screen in public
That is the difficult part for people to accept. Your friend chat might be full of adults and you have nothing to worry about when posting this content. But, say we got a major channel with hundreds of people that might or might not be adults. If there are NSFW channels, these children can access them. How to prevent this?
ID verification does not fix the issue, of course. But at the very least it minimizes the damage. As many state, children will find explicit content somewhere else - so why bother? I would argue that letting things stay as they are doesn’t solve the issue at all. Doesn’t even try to regulate it.
Discord has been known to be a gateway for children to explicit content. It also has been known as a place where many children diddlers been hanging around. This always has been an chat/call/video call app. People who miss their friend NSFW chats, can move them outside of the app and keep on using Discord as before without needing to prove their age. Maybe inconvenient, but not the end of the world.
I disagree that this will help at all. Certainly not to a degree that justifies restricting other people’s freedom. Grooming happens in small circles and doesn’t become substantially harder if teenagers can’t access nsfw channels. Predators don’t seek out adult-dominated spaces. Kids might be exposed to slightly less porn or something but they will still go to pornhub, and now an access channel where there are at least likely normal adults around that could give context id needed is restricted. Worst case they’ll be driven to fringe spaces filled with predators.
And also, people don’t just use nsfw channels for porn or questionable memes. People mark servers as 18+ for a variety of reasons, some have political discussion channels marked as nsfw to make them easier to avoid, etc.
I hate all age verification checks, I even hate Steam’s when they present me that dumb number drop list before I see a game’s store page based on its content. If you know my age, you don’t need to ever fucking ask me. If I’ve told you, with a straight face and no malicious intent that “I’m over 30” “I’m over 30” “I’m over 30” then STOP ASKING ME FOR MY AGE!!
Now something I don’t see some people talk about is that, there are people out there who have lied about their age. It’s nothing new. You’ve done it. I’ve done it. We’ve collectively been building a platform for this to eventually be coming and we’re paying some of that price.
With Discord going Public in March and this rolling out in March, it goes hand and hand.
Steam asking you Everytime means they ACTUALLY are deleting private details you give them, and only store them locally so you have full control over how long they know.
This is literally the fucking exact ideal way this should be handled. Why the fuck would you be upset over literally the most consumer way possible to handle age verification.
No one sane is going to pretend we don’t need some form of verification. Even if it is just lip service for legal purposes. 10 year olds should a have at least a check to be like hay this isn’t for you ask Mom and dad first. So parents can also be aware there IS something for them to be aware of.
You can’t expect parents to be omniscient after all.
So having companies actually respect data privacy and control, and give appropriate warnings is literally exactly what we want.
Actually, if it would be possible to somehow ask parents beforehand, it probably would be perfect.
Say, you register an internet connection and sign an email that will receive requests from DNS upon visiting explicit sites. Whenever you visit these sites, you get an email with a “Confirm” button. Let’s say it has 1 hour cooldown before sending request for the same domain again. In case your child dials up pornhub, you have a choice + you know they are trying to access something meant for adults.
As for open access points, they already been using DNS sinkholes and are totally not for NSFW stuff anyway, so all access denied by default.
No ID needed aside of signing up for an internet connection which already requires an ID anyway. Everyone is happy. No idea if it is possible.
They are not though, deleting the information. They are just not keeping it in that part of the system.
Anytime you think they are deleting your information, ask yourself, is that information valuable to them? The answer is always yes. Then ask, why would they delete it? Why would they not keep it secretly or otherwise? They would, they always do.
Which doesn’t even address the point that other interests got that information when you gave it to steam. You verifying your age is information the national security state would sweep up, but possibly others, to say nothing of hackers targeting the company holding the data. Some of whom are the national security state.
Because it’s like asking you for an ID to purchase alcohol. And you’re standing there with a full beard, some wrinkles in your skin and having an aged look. It’s insulting.
But I guess you wouldn’t know that because OMGVALVE!!
Oh no, I pissed off the angry little children and their alts. What won’t I do? :(
Tangential, but if it is enforced (alchohol has good reason to do so) it should be enforced impartially regardless of how you look, otherwise it’s discrimination. My comment is based on my Asian looking experience.
so… you do want face verification for online interactions?
edit: In-person, for a “regulated” substance - it seems reasonable to require that proof be checked as part of policy, regardless of appearance. There’s no storage (in most cases) and the cashier is the only one who looks at the ID and they are supposed to do it to keep their job. The only place I’ve seen recently where your ID is actually tracked is stuff like sudafed, where buying too much makes you a potential meth maker.
Online, the rule has been “trust me, bro” forever. There’s no person testing you, aside from maybe a paywall to ensure you have a credit card as an age check. Steam is doing the online equivalent of minimal validation and minimal retention that the booze store is.
This is hardly OMGVALVE.
Anytime they scan your id the information is stored. They know you went into that store and bought alcohol. If you think they aren’t storing that information, I’ve an exciting investment opportunity for you.
It doesn’t matter if the schlepps at the store don’t see the information stored and don’t retain a record, obviously they wouldn’t.
I hear that. My local ABC store doesn’t scan my ID, though I don’t see a future where they don’t eventually scan every time; and my local grocery store scans occasionally, but not always.
I can’t just not buy age-verified products, though, because sometimes it’s cold medicine or a prescription. **
Back to the original thread, this is not a Discord problem, this is a privacy problem. We need to push back on data capture in general and tell legislators that privacy is important to all people, even those who buy booze.
** could we make little sneaky stickers that obfuscate the barcode enough to prevent it scanning? The cashier would likely revert to visual inspection without the data retention: face matches photo, age is good, override.
What bothers me that people are outraged as if Discord would lock everyone out until they prove their age. As far as I can see, age verification is not mandatory unless you want to engage in 18+ channels. No major changes besides some friend invites warnings, blurred age restricted content and some other things.
I like your point about that nobody talks about children lying they are 18+. So far there are no way to restrict them from engaging in adult chatrooms. Discord has a insane reputation for being a cesspool of pedophilia and exposure to adult content to children. Shit ton of people talked about it. And now, when Discord decided to actually do something about it - major buzz against it.
Noting will change to any user if they use Discord to chat and play with friends. What will change is a mandatory verification for people who visit explicit groups and channels marked as 18+ content. No more, no less.
As you have mentioned, they are protecting themselves before going public.
I use discord to chat and play with friends, many servers have an nsfw channel to share things that you probably don’t want to suddenly be on your phone screen in public. It will also filter images in dms.
It’s not the end of the world, but it’s ineffective at tackling the actual problem, if anything adds appeal by making content “forbidden”. I’m certainly cancelling my cheap nitro I’ve had for a while because I’m not giving any company arbitrarily implementing identity verification any of my money.
I’ll also probably look into setting up my own matrix server later…
That is the difficult part for people to accept. Your friend chat might be full of adults and you have nothing to worry about when posting this content. But, say we got a major channel with hundreds of people that might or might not be adults. If there are NSFW channels, these children can access them. How to prevent this?
ID verification does not fix the issue, of course. But at the very least it minimizes the damage. As many state, children will find explicit content somewhere else - so why bother? I would argue that letting things stay as they are doesn’t solve the issue at all. Doesn’t even try to regulate it.
Discord has been known to be a gateway for children to explicit content. It also has been known as a place where many children diddlers been hanging around. This always has been an chat/call/video call app. People who miss their friend NSFW chats, can move them outside of the app and keep on using Discord as before without needing to prove their age. Maybe inconvenient, but not the end of the world.
I disagree that this will help at all. Certainly not to a degree that justifies restricting other people’s freedom. Grooming happens in small circles and doesn’t become substantially harder if teenagers can’t access nsfw channels. Predators don’t seek out adult-dominated spaces. Kids might be exposed to slightly less porn or something but they will still go to pornhub, and now an access channel where there are at least likely normal adults around that could give context id needed is restricted. Worst case they’ll be driven to fringe spaces filled with predators.
And also, people don’t just use nsfw channels for porn or questionable memes. People mark servers as 18+ for a variety of reasons, some have political discussion channels marked as nsfw to make them easier to avoid, etc.