alt Hacker NewsDiscord Just Killed Anonymity
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https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...
> For the majority of adult users, we will be able to confirm your age group using information we already have. We use age prediction to determine, with high confidence, when a user is an adult. This allows many adults to access age-appropriate features without completing an explicit age check.
> Facial scans never leave your device. Discord and our vendor partners never receive it. IDs are used to get your age only and then deleted. Discord only receives your age — that’s it. Your identity is never associated with your account.
> We leverage an advanced machine learning model developed at Discord to predict whether a user falls into a particular age group based on patterns of user behavior and several other signals associated with their account on Discord. We only use these signals to assign users to an age group when our confidence level is high; when it isn't, users go through our standard age assurance flow to confirm their age. We do not use your message content in the age estimation model.
I work with corporate privacy all of the time, and there is actually something really interesting going on here. We're basically never allowed to claim legal compliance using heuristics or predictive models. Like, never ever. They demand a paper trail on everything, and telling our legal team that we are going to leave it to an algorithm on a user device would make them foam at the mouth.
They are basically trusting a piece of software to look at your face or ID in the same way that, like, a server at a restaurant would check before serving you alcohol.
I am curious to see if this kind of software compliance in the long run is even allowable by regulators.
I used to use discord for games a long time ago, but then I noticed it was being used for more serious stuff. For example, LLVM moved their chats from mailinglists to discord, as did a lot of open source projects. These are big, important projects, and now their chats are not discoverable and will soon be behind ID checks.
It really bothered me that so many important projects were relying on a proprietary chat technology instead of using mailinglists or IRC which were more decentralized and under the control of the local admin.
I would like to get back to a situation in which you can participate in group chats for open source projects without these being hosted on closed platforms, but if this results in major open source projects shifting from discord to telegram or whatsapp, then nothing will have been learned.
Discord has always had dark patterns which basically ban anonymity. If you aren't fingerprintable enough (using VPN, etc) they will force you to enter a phone number. They also encourage guild admins to require it, although it is technically a choice.
> If you're staying on Discord, enjoy the surveillance. For the rest of us: it's time to learn how to self-host.
Hmmm. I feel like self-hosting is the FASTEST way to lose your anonymity. Your self hosted service is MUCH more easily tied to your identity than some third party like discord.
Just imagine you set up a self-hosted forum where you want to discuss something you want to keep private, but the government is very interested and wants to know who you are talking to.
Well, now they know any IP address connecting to your forum is a person of interest. They don't need to decrypt anything to know you are talking to each other.
By using something unique, you are going to make yourself uniquely identifiable.
I’m going to do a video on this soon, but I was able to get Ergo IRCd and TheLounge up and running pretty quickly; https://chat.crilly.au/
I’ll be building a new platform on these two technologies and using Zoom or something else like Jitsi on the side for video/audio sharing.
It’s time accept the loss of “features” and go back to something simpler but also something that can still be here in 38 years — like IRC has been.
> mandatory age verification for all users is rolling out next month
I thought age verification was only required to access "adult" content?
The section of people who care about anonymity has always been fairly small, even on niche communities like Hacker News. As an example, the most popular comment on the Australian social network ban for teens is in favour: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208348
Watching as things play out, I understand why people try to target discord et al. with their complaints about the loss of anonymity. Being a tiny minority they have no hope to influence their governments because the opposite position is widely popular.
Therefore, they try to convince commercial entities to disregard these laws as much as possible. This is particularly useful for that niche since fighting legislation cannot in itself be done anonymously. Therefore, they attempt to transform a very nonymous (haha) entity to do the fighting on their behalf. If the attempt fails, no harm befalls them.
I think it's a doomed endeavour. To get users on discord, it has to be portrayed to parents as a safe and legal service. The days of underground BBSes are gone. Now, if your brand gets associated with anything negative you're toast. And realistically the anonymous users are kind of useless as a whole. They won't pay, so they're practically just a drag on your platform. Losing them risks not very much.
Overall, a fight with a bygone conclusion. If you want anonymity you have to use other tools and be aware that simply using those tools marks you out as someone who desires anonymity.
Discord has always felt more personal than just voice comms over a game. The way you can see more and more about what your friends are doing - like what song on spotify or how long you're playing fortnite, and how many days in a row you're playing these games.
I feel like it has always been on this path to capture more and more of your data and personally link it to who you are.
Discord doesn't care about user privacy nor user security and actively retaliates against people.
Their DPO ignored a PII leak I discovered and reported last year. Their dpo mail address just creates a zendesk ticket, I was able to view the ticket was locked and marked "solved" with no response a few days later.
So, I brought it to the Dutch DPA, who were very responsive, and on the same day as their "final update" email, my nearly-decade old Discord account was suddenly "suspended" hours later. The PII leak, which had been ongoing for over a year before my discovery at that point was suddenly stopped the same day. Funny how that works.
It took 5+ months for Discord's DPO and informal disputes team to finally get back to me after informing them of the retaliation, with irrelevant copy & paste templates giving me walk through guides on how to file a "trust and safety" ticket.
When filing a ticket with "trust and safety" under appeal categories I get an automated "please appeal your ban through the app! I am now closing this ticket" response and my ticket's locked once again. And of course, appealing through the app gives me a generic system error.
Anonymity and Discord sounds funny when used in the same sentence. They've always been pretty greedy about user data and had hard to avoid phone verification for a very long time.
Whatever happened to TorChat? Hopefully we are entering another golden age of "dissident" tech that seems to have culturally stagnated for at least a decade now.
Discord didn’t kill anonymity you did .
>mandatory age verification for all users is rolling out next month.
This is a lie, this only affects you if you want to view porn/nsfw channels on discord. I'm in the UK happily using it without age verification.
If you're looking for an alternative, I'm building flotilla.social, a self-hostable chat app built on nostr, which uses cryptographic identities to prevent identity capture.
Cool!
docker run --name ircd -p 6667:6667 inspircd/inspircd-docker
These articles feel like an overreaction. I use Discord daily and I don't think there is any reason for me to verify at all. The new restrictions are reasonable and don't affect the way I use the app.
Does anyone have a list of good Matrix boards to join?
No it didn’t. Discord killed itself.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
What's really more distressing is that it got this far before people figured out the game--maybe we should be reflecting on that part, the gullibility and the enabling of those people by those who knew better.
To access age-gated parts of Discord, you need to verify your age. This sounds reasonable. It's not much different to having your id card checked when purchasing alcohol. Actually it's better as you only have to do it once, not on each visit.
I guess this is a good thing. It will reduce spammers and scammers that are invading every server like locusts these days.
It will reduce attacks on and abuse of people, because those are usually founded on anonymity (no fear for repercussions etc.)
I don't mind having a platform where everyone is at least somehow verified. yes, sure, you can bypass it and it is not 100% foolproof but what ever is? It raises the barrier for abuse and that's a good thing IMHO
Now the problem becomes would you rather trade convenience with privacy. Many people rather trade away privacy nowadays because they thought they got nothing up their sleeves.
After they were roasted by the 2022–2023 Pentagon doc leaks, it was pretty obvious they were going to take action.
And not just that event: Parents are roasting Roblox for kids getting groomed, but after the relationship is initiated, the groomers always immediately the convo to Discord.
The CEO of Discord Humam Sakhnini, is a former partner at McKinsey. I think that tells you everything you need to know.
Lawyers killed anonymity, Discord's finger just pulled the trigger.
Why do we care so much about closed platform Discord around here?
This is a speed-run pre-IPO enshitification phase for Discord and needs to be ready for Wall Street and this also happened with Reddit.
Image what will happen post-IPO.
Discord is so utterly horrible. Let it burn.
..."just"?
Did they forget it's proprietary, and from the same person that made OpenFeint, which also had a privacy lawsuit?
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> Discord dropped the hammer: mandatory age verification for all users is rolling out next month. The era of anonymous gaming chats is officially over.
This isn't really accurate. Age verification is not mandatory for all accounts. You will be able to join a Discord with your friends, chat, and do voice without age verification.
Here's the exact list of what's restricted if you don't verify:
> Content Filters: Discord users will need to be age-assured as adults in order to unblur sensitive content or turn off the setting.
> Age-gated Spaces – Only users who are age-assured as adults will be able to access age-restricted channels, servers, and app commands.
> Message Request Inbox: Direct messages from people a user may not know are routed to a separate inbox by default, and access to modify this setting is limited to age-assured adult users.
> Friend Request Alerts: People will receive warning prompts for friend requests from users they may not know.
> Stage Restrictions: Only age-assured adults may speak on stage in servers.
Taken from the announcement https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...
So the claim that Discord is making ID verification "mandatory" or that you need it for gaming chats is untrue.