Why Discord's New Age Verification Policy Is Sparking A Privacy Backlash

Discord has committed to a global rollout of "teen-by-default" settings. That means users who change some specific settings or attempt to access age-restricted content on the platform, may be prompted to verify their age. Discord age verification currently uses facial age estimation or a scanned government ID, but the company says more options are coming in the future. Discord also claims it will be implementing an "age inference model", which will run in the background to guess whether or not an account belongs to an adult, which may allow some users to forego the verification steps entirely.

At first glance, this may not seem like a bad move, but privacy and free speech advocates are making some strong arguments against Discord implementing systems like this.


By far the largest concern with this change to Discord policy is security. While Discord claims that it won't use the same vendor for ID scans that was recently compromised, and that the new vendor won't be using facial recognition or storing IDs or personal information after the user's age has been confirmed, critics are still vocal about the possibility of a similar breach. For those unaware, during the October data breach, over 70 thousand IDs were leaked.

Another concern is that whatever Discord's systems deem adult or explicit content may not actually be, or could even relate to political issues being censored, since Discord is deciding what content is classified as "sensitive".

If Discord's claims of facial scans never leaving the device and IDs/identity not being stored hold up to long-term scrutiny, privacy-minded users should have some relief. However, a vocal portion of the Discord userbase is now openly looking for alternative platforms, and the long-term impact of this move may ultimately hurt the company more than it helps. To make a quick comparison, Skype's massive popularity only lasted about ten years, and fizzled after the Microsoft acquisition, to the point where it was eventually killed off in favor of Teams. Only time will tell how this update will impact Discord's pervasiveness.