Discord Will Require a Face Scan or ID for Full Access Next Month
6 166Discord said today it's rolling out age verification on its platform globally starting next month, when it will automatically set all users' accounts to a "teen-appropriate" experience unless they demonstrate that they're adults. From a report: Users who aren't verified as adults will not be able to access age-restricted servers and channels, won't be able to speak in Discord's livestream-like "stage" channels, and will see content filters for any content Discord detects as graphic or sensitive. They will also get warning prompts for friend requests from potentially unfamiliar users, and DMs from unfamiliar users will be automatically filtered into a separate inbox.
[...] A government ID might still be required for age verification in its global rollout. According to Discord, to remove the new "teen-by-default" changes and limitations, "users can choose to use facial age estimation or submit a form of identification to [Discord's] vendor partners, with more options coming in the future." The first option uses AI to analyze a user's video selfie, which Discord says never leaves the user's device. If the age group estimate (teen or adult) from the selfie is incorrect, users can appeal it or verify with a photo of an identity document instead. That document will be verified by a third party vendor, but Discord says the images of those documents "are deleted quickly -- in most cases, immediately after age confirmation."
6 comments
Re:Why do they do this (Score: 5, Insightful)
by eepok ( 545733 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @11:31AM (#65977786)
To mitigate tort liability and preserve financial partnerships.
Re:Why do they do this (Score: 5, Insightful)
by sinij ( 911942 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @11:56AM (#65977872)
They want to collect your personally identifying data so they can share it with governments looking to clamp down on dissenters. That is, Discord is a willing participant in implementing turn key authoritarianism.
Re:Why do they do this (Score: 5, Interesting)
by karmawarrior ( 311177 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @01:45PM (#65978174)
Because in numerous states (and nations in the case of Europe) there is a legal requirement to heavily restrict what people under 18 can see on social networks (if indeed under 18s are allowed to participate.) These laws have been extensively covered on Slashdot.
Right now there's no easy way to detect ages online, so Roblox, Discord, et al, are rolling out age verification systems that rely upon associating real world IDs with accounts. This is a terrible thing for privacy - which may even be the intent behind the laws in the first place.
What might be better would be having HTTP headers that mark content as child-safe (with child safe content losing some S.230 protections), and letting parents install web browsers that can use the flag. People who want S.230 protections need do nothing, parents who want to have some control over content without literally sitting next to their kid whenever they visit Wikipedia can set the flag appropriately on a supporting browser with password protection to prevent the kids from reverting it.
That'd ensure the checking is anonymous and would deal with the concerns of most parents about dubious content on the Internet.
But... what they want is actually to get rid of anonyminity.
Re:Why do they do this (Score: 5, Insightful)
by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @04:13PM (#65978564)
Those laws are fundamentally contrary to freedom. They are effectively not just restricting the rights of the speaker and the listener, but also, in the case of minors, restricting the parental rights of their parents or legal guardians, putting those parental rights into the hands of the state. And that's a bad thing:
Different people want different things for their kids on each of those spectra. Some people want their kids to see basically no skin. Some parents just don't want their kids ogling pictures of girls twerking in swimsuits. And some don't mind if their kids see porn. Some parents don't want their kids exposed to graphic violence without them knowing about it. Some want to shelter their kids from everything even a little violent. Some want their kids to only know their own political views and not contrary viewpoints. Some want their kids to be exposed to a breadth of ideas and cultures so they will grow up to be well-rounded adults. And every one of those viewpoints is entirely reasonable.
You can't serve everyone's interests at once by passing laws about what things minors can see. Such laws will always be either too strict for some and too lax for others, too lax for everyone, or too strict for everyone. Whatever you choose, you're violating the parental rights of some or all parents by doing so. More to the point, time and time again, it has been shown that you cannot protect children by the government trying to take the place of their parents. It doesn't work. It never has. It never will.
Government should provide the tools that parents need to make good decisions. This means requiring browsers to make age verification available in a secure way (per account or device) that guarantees the following privacies:
This also means requiring browsers to provide tools for parents to grant their kids control over content that they find objectionable, either on a per-item, per-category, or global basis, and requiring that governments respect the parents' decision.
Doing this well is hard, but doing it badly is unacceptable.
Discord data breach October 2020 (Score: 5, Informative)
by Lvdata ( 1214190 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @11:11AM (#65977738)
They had a data breach of ID scans. Their “answer” is corporate enshittifaction ( https://discord.com/press-rele... [discord.com] ) Do we want to trust them AGAIN?!
No thanks (Score: 5, Funny)
by TwistedGreen ( 80055 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @11:16AM (#65977750)
I guess it's back to IRC