Discord delays age verification plans after user outcry

Reuters

Discord is pushing back plans to start verifying the age of all users in March after weeks of user ire.

Stanislav Vishnevskiy, Discord's co-founder and chief technology officer, said a planned global rollout of a verification process to determine users under the age of 16 would be delayed until the latter half of this year.

Discord stressed it would meet any specific legal obligations it has for age verification of users, and that age verification will be part of the platform in the future

However, the platform said it was now developing "more verification options" for users that would not require facial or ID scans. One such option in development is credit card verification.

"We knew this rollout was going to be controversial," Vishnevskiy wrote in a Tuesday blog post.

"In hindsight, we should have provided more detail about our intentions and how the process works."

He added that a broader mistrust in tech companies and online surveillance has fed into concern over why Discord is doing age verification at all, and what it will do with such information going forward.

"I get that scepticism. It's earned, not just toward us, but toward the entire tech industry," Vishnevskiy wrote.

Less than 10% of users are expected to need to verify their age when the company does roll out the process later this year, he added.

Those users would be unable to access "age-restricted content" and some default settings would be put in place until their age is verified.

Part of the explanation for why so few users will need to verify their age is that Discord already uses an internal "age determination" system that looks at "how long your account has existed, whether you have a payment method on file, what types of servers you're in, and general patterns of account activity."

Vishnevskiy said this system "does not read your messages, analyse your conversations, or look at the content you post" in order to determine your age.

Given the lack of trust among users around this issue, the chief technology officer added that Discord will publish the age determination methodology before age verification rolls out globally.

The platform, which says it has 200 million monthly users, initially planned to roll out global age verification measures by defaulting users into a version of Discord created for people under 16 years old until their age was verified.

Discord is attempting to get in line with various new and expected rules around social media access for young people in countries like the UK, Australia, the EU and Brazil, and as individual states in the US consider their own rules.

The company is also planning to go public this year, according to numerous reports.

See more IT services here.

But its age verification plan, which would have required either a facial, photo or government ID scan to confirm the claimed age of users, drew near-instant ire from Discord's community.

One user Alastair, or Eret, who hosts a server on the platform with more than 60,000 users, told the BBC simply, "I do not trust them."

Many Discord users were drawn to the platform because it offered people a way to create more private online spaces for discussion.

A Discord server, like the one Alastair hosts, is an invite-only space within the platform where users can chat via text, voice and video.

But Discord has also had recent issues with user security sowing distrust.

In October, official ID photos of around 70,000 users that Discord had gathered from a previous age-verification partnership were likely leaked through a cyber-attack.

Discord reiterated on Tuesday that when it eventually does roll out a global age verifications system, no images used in the process will be stored.

Then, over the last week, online researchers found that Persona, another company Discord had partnered with in the UK for age verification, had left thousands of files exposed on the open internet.

Discord was quick to distance itself from Persona, saying the test it had done with that company was limited and now over.

Discord has soared in popularity in recent years, mainly as a place for online gamers, some of whom stream their gaming activities on other platforms like Twitch, to congregate, often anonymously.

Since the pandemic, Vishnevskiy said "the number of teenagers on Discord has significantly increased."

'I do not trust them' – top streamers left concerned by Discord age checks

ID photos of 70,000 users may have been leaked, Discord says

Discord to start requiring face scan or ID to access adult content

GamingFacial recognitionSocial mediaInternet privacy

Original aticle here: BBC