alt Hacker NewsDiscord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
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(( This is a repost of what I shared on Reddit here https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/1r05vkj/comment... but I think the context will be helpful for this group, too. This article title is very misleading. ))
Tl;dr: The vast majority of adults will never have to interact with our age assurance systems and their experience won't change, because we know Discord and how people use it, so we're designing to respect privacy and deliver a safer experience while minimizing friction for adults.
Hey folks –
I’ve been on Discord since very early 2016 and actually joined the company in 2017. Safety is one of my areas, so today’s announcement on our blog is something I’ve been pretty involved with. I’ve always cared about Discord's approach to privacy (E2EE for A/V was another of my projects here), so I figured I’d add some more context to today's news.
I can say confidently that the vast majority of people will never see age verification. I say this because we launched age assurance in the UK and Australia in 2025, and we have some pretty good data on this now. The idea here is that we can pre-identify most adults based on what we already know (not including your messages!), and that looks to get us pretty far here. No face scans, no IDs, for the vast majority of adults.
And if you are one of the smaller subset of folks that we can't definitively pre-identify, then still, you only have to do it if you're accessing age-restricted servers or channels, or changing certain settings. That's really not most users. (Altho... might be more Redditors, tbh.)
Last, I know that there is concern about privacy and data leaks. That's a real concern. The selfie system is built purely client-side, it never leaves your device, and we did that intentionally. That'll work for a bunch of users who aren't pre-identified as adults. But if you do end up in the ID bucket, then yeah, you're right that has some risk. We're doing what we can to minimize this by working with our range of partners (who are different partners than the data leak you read about), and if it's any help, we learned a lot internally from the last issue. But I get if that doesn't necessarily inspire more confidence.
Anyway, we’ll be sharing more next month as we get closer to the global roll out about the system, including the technology behind it in March. I honestly wouldn't be happy if we didn't build something good and I am excited about what we’re launching, but please let us know what you think when we share more details.
And I really appreciate everybody's feedback here today. We’re definitely reading it!
The endgame I see is that it will be illegal to communicate on the internet without having a proven bank account. At least in the USA where all ID verification is settling on banks (ie, Plaid). And the banks will tolerate 10,000 false positive denials of service to avoid a single false negative and be happy about it. Plaid even more so. Human beings will have no recourse as they are private companies. This really should be a service that the states of the federal government provide. It's a dark future we're speeding towards.
Somewhat related: I created an HN users Signal group, following the massive success and utility of creating a friends-and-associates Signal groupchat (that ends up discussing privacy/security/AI/etc).
HN User Chat: https://signal.group/#CjQKICCPlygJ6YXA0jqqOcE0K3AHovCOX4WKEN...
If you follow me and want to join my friends-and-associates one, I’m @sneak.07 on Signal.
The CEO of Discord is Humam Sakhnini. He's from McKinsey. So that tracks.
I'm only on a few programming related discords and not going to lie, even those are slightly toxic. So bye discord.
Based. Kids should start gamefaqs again!
ENOPE.
No thanks. Discord, it has been fun, but I decline.
meh, discord hasn't done anything interesting in years. i'm mostly on Sup these days https://sup.net/i/rgc-fnqc43h
I know Discord is popular, but I've tried about 3 dozen servers on a ton of hobby topics (linux , raspberry pi, golang, various games, politics) and I've found the caliber of conversation to be very poor. Nothing like forums, stack exchange or even reddit (especially pre-2012) in terms of topic focus, support quality, creativity, technicality. Convos tend to be banal, cliche, monoculture.
I would love to hear a testimony from someone who finds their Discord servers to be edifying or uplifting. What worked?
No thanks
Thanks to all the OSS projects that adopted this in preference to mailing lists to better appeal to zoomers. (And note that while these projects often do still have mailing lists, most of the actual discussion now takes place on Discord, behind an authwall.)
It's clear "age verification" is not something we'll get rid of, so I think instead we should push for a publicly verifiable double-blind (zero-knowledge proof) solution that can ensure it only gives the websites a boolean and doesn't allow correlation from either side.
The alternative is having to give your ID to Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and all the other bad actors...
can't wait to beat it with a face-swap or some random driving license found on the internet
Finally I feel validated complaining for the last decade about the move away from IRC/teamspeak to centralized services. I've been called all kinds of names.
Now those same people are complaining they're gonna have to submit their faces to discord. Which will eventually be used to prosecute or commit fraud. I'm left wondering if "tech enthusiasts" are ever actually correct.
no more discord GenZ
Just another instance of companies participating in the creation of the police state.
These companies do not do this under external pressure from the state, they do this because it benefits and consolidates their power as well.
It's bricks for their castle wall.
Corporations should not be considered a separate entity from the state. Corporations form state power. This doesn't mean they are always in-line with the state, but that they lead the state as a block, as a class, defending their common interests.
Policing is one of them.
Yeah good fucking luck with that. Time for the "discord alternatives" search on Google.
Looks like it might be opt-in by server.
Alternative: run your own self-hosted messaging server for you, your family and friends. No company should ever get such sensitive data as private conversations.
Use Discord with a throw-away account. Create a character in GTA 5 on your laptop and show its face (in "selfie" mode) to the web-camera on another computer with Discord open. All face scan checks so far gladly accept it. Instagram has been requiring occasional face checks for ages already.
How many people are doing age restricted stuff on Discord (besides the specifically there for adult content and gooning crowd)
All of my use is primarily professional and gaming and has no age concerns
Honestly they're probably big enough to get away with it.
If it was only friend groups it would kill them for sure, we've seen that many times, but given the absurd amount many large online communities on Discord, I'd wager they can force it down and be relatively unscathed.
They played the long game - they provided a good service for 10 years, and got REALLY big before they started the enshittification process.
You can, of course, not do this (you meaning the company, Discord)
You can choose to be respectful of people who have valid reasons for not providing ID
But you want that sweet IPO money (as stated elsewhere in this thread). You don't actually care about the internet and how anonymity is a cool thing for certain vulnerable groups
All these tech CEOs should face prison time and I'm not joking. They've displayed a complete laissez faire attitude to all of these concerns
Hard no. Reality is that this push is everywhere. Authoritarian governments are cracking down hard on dissent, they're not going to leave huge platforms for communication untouched. We'll need open source decentralized alternatives.
Haven't cared about Discord in a long time. In fact I'm glad they're continuing to shoot themselves in the foot.
During the pandemic, I was on a Discord server for folks to socialize and blow off steam about the whole situation. Yes, there were some anti-vaxx wackos, but overall the place was civil and balanced, and I met some interesting people through it. We cracked jokes and it was a little bit of fun in a tough time.
One day I came to discover that Discord had banned the server for allegedly violating... something. I wish I had written down everyone's emails because I permanently lost contact with a bunch of friends in an instant.
I never signed in to Discord again, in spite of times where some other social group wanted to use it. I vowed never to use Discord again. Fuck those guys and the Teslas they rode in on. I hope this ID verification thing is another big step towards their irrelevancy.
Reminder: “age verification” is just another way of spelling “every single user of the service must provide a government ID to use it”.
By Discord's own ToS you can't use Discord if you are under 13, so this change is just to make sure users that are 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 years old are appropriately labelled.
Why doesn't Discord require ALL users to upload their faces to prove that they are at least 13 years old and eligible to use the service?
This is not OK.
right now someone is vibecoding a locally hostable discord clone.
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Finally the kids will be safe. We did it everyone! /s
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another one bites the dust.
No thank you, get fucked
As an ethical conundrum, this one is clear. The safety of women and children online (human trafficking, r*pe and child abuse networks openly coordinate at industrial scale on Discord, Roblox and Telegram) trumps the concerns of a relatively small group of Richard Stallman-level purity obsessives. Good move on Discord's part; hopefully Roblox and Telegram shape up and follow suit. If you don't understand the severity of the current situation in 2026, Google the group "764."
Good, this will hit hard on nazi-incel-related "communities".
This age verification thing is being overblown if you understand how they're implementing it. You still shouldn't use Discord, but this isn't why.
https://keet.io is this industry's best kept secret. Encypted p2p chat with audio and video, no signups, it just works. My kids and their friends switched from Discord to Keet to avoid all the signup / authentication friction.
Finally, but done wrong. This should be done by 3rd party app (probably owned by government) with access token without sharing one's identity.
I'm so glad I always refused to accept this one.
I don't know what people need as lesson. We already have so many FLOW options, and yet they are so many running after the last shiny ready for enshitification ready to go platform.
Expect them to sell your whole life to whatever party with enough money to throw at their face.