mango-ki
mango
Discord has recently announced that they will begin rolling out age ID verification in March, and setting all accounts to "teen" by default unless an ID is given to access NSFW channels, or sensitive content, as well as message requests on Discord. While that sounds reasonable at first, this is likely the start of further locking down access to Discord's features without handing over a photo of your face or your government ID to prove that you're old enough to use the service, a trend we've been seeing on other social media platforms in recent months.
Discord has been caught out for using Persona as it's age ID service, which has ties to dodgy figures and organisations. This also comes after Discord's help desk had a data breach several months ago where 70'000 IDs were exposed, mainly from users in the UK. On top of that, the tech has been proven to be unreliable, and users can easily bypass it with various different methods.
Realistically, Discord can already verify your age using the large amount of existing data they already have on you, and they do claim to use this info initially to verify your age as well, but regardless, they're now going down the same path as most other social media platforms and governments across the world and forcing you to hand over your ID to prove how old you are, in the name of "protecting kids online", regardless of whether you're an adult or not.
This is increasingly being seen as a way to de-anonymise users online and tie their real-life identity to their online identities, which is a massive privacy concern. Remember when we were taught to never share personal information on the Internet? Now, the very thing we were warned against doing is being increasingly normalised online by governments and big-tech platforms alike.
I've already deleted my 5-year-old Discord account (something I should've done earlier, to be honest). Do you think it's time that SRB2 goes back to ol' reliable IRC for real-time chat on Freenode? At least IRC as a protocol is never going to try any of the same stuff that every social media platform, now including Discord, is trying on its users. And it's a free and open protocol! And if you want voice chat, Mumble is also a perfectly good alternative, if not better than Discord's VoIP backend.
Let me know what you think.
Discord has been caught out for using Persona as it's age ID service, which has ties to dodgy figures and organisations. This also comes after Discord's help desk had a data breach several months ago where 70'000 IDs were exposed, mainly from users in the UK. On top of that, the tech has been proven to be unreliable, and users can easily bypass it with various different methods.
Realistically, Discord can already verify your age using the large amount of existing data they already have on you, and they do claim to use this info initially to verify your age as well, but regardless, they're now going down the same path as most other social media platforms and governments across the world and forcing you to hand over your ID to prove how old you are, in the name of "protecting kids online", regardless of whether you're an adult or not.
This is increasingly being seen as a way to de-anonymise users online and tie their real-life identity to their online identities, which is a massive privacy concern. Remember when we were taught to never share personal information on the Internet? Now, the very thing we were warned against doing is being increasingly normalised online by governments and big-tech platforms alike.
I've already deleted my 5-year-old Discord account (something I should've done earlier, to be honest). Do you think it's time that SRB2 goes back to ol' reliable IRC for real-time chat on Freenode? At least IRC as a protocol is never going to try any of the same stuff that every social media platform, now including Discord, is trying on its users. And it's a free and open protocol! And if you want voice chat, Mumble is also a perfectly good alternative, if not better than Discord's VoIP backend.
Let me know what you think.
