Discord Drops Persona After Users Blast UK Age Checks And Data Practices

Discord has drawn significant criticism lately, thanks to a major data breach in October and the debut of a new "Teen-By-Default" policy, which will require select users to verify their age by uploading a government issued ID. At the root of the criticism was Discord's involvement with Persona, an "age assurance" firm partially funded by controversial Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel. Hackers found that some of Persona's frontend code was seemingly tied to US government surveillance efforts, including an apparent OpenAI-powered watchlist database. This led to speculation that Persona could be tied to immigration enforcement (ICE) and government intelligence agencies, though Persona has denied those claims and clarified that Peter Thiel is only an investor and not involved with its operations.

Even so, Discord confirmed in a statement to Ars Technica that it wouldn't be working with Persona any longer and that its temporary run within the UK using Persona as an age assurance vendor lasted less than a month. While the specific concerns regarding Persona will be eliminated by this move, the "teen-by-default" policy and push for intrusive age verification remains. At the same time, these age verification techniques are becoming more common across the web, as politicians push for a less-anonymous, age-gated Internet.


This has left Persona in a fairly unfortunate position. CEO Rick Song took to social media to engage with critics, including one of the hackers who revealed the OpenAI database present within the exposed frontend code. The hacker in question, named Celeste @vmfunc on X/Twitter, eventually agreed that some of the flagged security concerns were not severe. The entire email exchange was posted publicly on X/Twitter and reported on by Ars Technica. The exchange between hacker and CEO seemed to reflect good faith on behalf of both parties, though as Celeste notes, "Unfortunately, there is no way I can fully trust you (Song) here and you know this." However, Celeste and the other hackers also stated that they found "zero references" to ICE or other entities concerning critics within the source files they found.