Discord announced a revamped global age verification system

Rather than waiting to be told how to do it, we’re launching our own privacy-preserving approach: one that reflects your feedback.

Right, Discord is well known for respecting user privacy. That makes perfect sense to me.

My privacy preserving choice is to not give them anything. I'll take the consequences as they come.

Cool. If they don't ask for anything, whatever. They could already do all that anyway.

Unfortunately, experience tells us that it always gets worse. We'll see.

"You won't have to verify your age because we have already determined it and assigned it to your account."

--is not exactly what I would call a reassuring message.

It's like if you called up the local pizza place and said "My address is--" and they said "Don't worry we already got it", and it's the first time you have ever rung them. Concerning yeah?

I'd much rather an online service simply not attempt to determine anything about me at all, not record any information (supplied or estimated), and simply perform the function I wish it to perform.

I also understand this desire is now functionally incompatible with the laws being imposed on online services by governments. And as such my anger is appropriately directed to them. But it is worth noting, it's not like Discord was doing great at protecting our privacy before. I have no doubt they were already gathering lots of 'signals' about our accounts previously and using that information in ways which we don't like.

Protecting privacy going forward is only going to get harder each year I imagine.. In an era of statistical prediction models, I have no doubt that at this point Discord, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, etc, they all probably have models for assessing collected data about a user, such as messages sent, activity, purchases, etc, and have a fairly accurate strong estimate for all of us of our age, gender, country of origin, main spoken languages, interests, relationship status, sexual orientation, education level, profession, hobbies, entertainment preferences, and favourite foods... and if they wanted to, could probably even train lightweight LLM models to scan conversation history to obtain any slipped mentioned real world details for the previous, plus other specifics like names or addresses or other personal details.

That's the scary part, if you have for example a Gmail account, at this point Google probably knows more about you than your partner or parents or best friend combined. And if they don't, it's only because they haven't plugged the technology together yet to achieve that, and it's only a matter of time before they do. It's no longer conspiracy theory level stuff, this stuff is realistically doable and we know it's beneficial to the companies to do it, so it's just a matter of time (if it isn't already happening anyway).

It's not going to be enough going forward to simply not supply this information to a service to keep it private, it's going to become impossible to keep this information private unless you simply refuse to use any online platform that might potentially gather personal information from your activity. And that's going to be difficult, because in many cases you'll be forced to do so by employers.

I guess the point I'm getting at is, while I'd love to get mad at tech companies over all this stuff, truly the only people who can protect us from this kind of privacy invasion is our governments, and yet right now they're the ones screaming for privacy invasion more than the damn tech companies. We're screwed I guess?

Last edited by gradyvuckovic on 23 Sep 2026 at 9:53 am UTC

Maybe people will now be able to post numbers between the 5 and 13 without getting banned.
Asking a Microsoft product not to spy on you won't work either way. Asking it to be accurate can still be hoped for.

Like it or not, this problem is down to individual countries and US states expanding their requirements for apps and operating systems to check ages. Discord, like other apps, have been forced into this.

To an extent yes, and there's no reason to not keep fighting it on that side as much as you can which I hope you all are doing. But this is a global rollout overstepping to get more data over you as if they don't have enough already and that's unacceptable on it's own. I believe they learned they have to apply the boiling frog theory after last time and they're banking on it.

I think that protecting children from adult content in communication with other person could harm secure communication. If Signal should filter each message, we lose something very important: our privacy. What do you think?

Discord is trying to set a world record for enshittification, and doing a REALLY good job at it, so everyone should remember: EVERYTHING THEY SAY IS A LIE. It's all lies all around just so they can prop up their valuation. Nothing whatsoever they say is true and don't trust a single word of any of it.

Perfect example: the side splitting comedy of them using anything near the words like "privacy preserving" in any announcement they ever do.

It always starts with "Won't somebody think of the children!" and gets worse from there.

I'm going to accept this as the compromise it is being framed as. It could have been a lot worse, and like it or not they have no choice due to government regulations. Maybe other companies will see Discord's approach and copy it.