Discord is delaying age verification checks for a little while after its plan inspired a lot of hand-wringing among the community. But it’s not backing down.
Discord cofounder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy said in a Tuesday blog post that, okay, maybe the company messed up when it announced it was going to verify the ages of users beginning in March and restrict unverified accounts from accessing potentially adult spaces.
“We’ve made mistakes. I won’t pretend we haven’t,” Vishnevskiy said. “Many of you walked away thinking we’re requiring face scans and ID uploads from everyone just to use Discord.”
The Discord CTO said the company has no plans to do that, as we explained in our story earlier this month, “but the fact that so many people believe it tells us we failed at our most basic job: clearly explaining what we’re doing and why. That’s on us.”
Discord’s actual plans to verify users’ ages isn’t explicitly changing, the company said today. It’s still going to use an automated system, and around 90 percent of users should never notice a change. The system will work out their age based on account signals, including the account’s age, whether a payment method is on file, what type of servers a user belongs to, and other “general patterns of account activity.” And that’ll be it.
Messages, conversations, or posts are not reviewed as part of age determination, he said.
“Discord already runs safety systems that catch spam rings, prevent raids, and detect coordinated abuse, powered by our rules engine,” Vishnevskiy explained. Age determination will work largely the same way, and will be done by internal Discord systems, not a third-party vendor.
When age verification is needed, Vishnevskiy noted, users will be able to choose from multiple vendors, all of which will be listed on Discord’s website, and users will be able to review what methods they use, how data is handled, and the like.
Persona? Not grata
One age verification partner that won’t be present in Discord’s eventual rollout is Persona, which recently caught flack for reportedly exposing a front end on a government server. The researchers who exposed the opening speculated that it was of a widespread conspiracy to turn identity verification data into a government-controlled people tracker.
Persona has been in communication with the researchers and has expressed gratitude to them for pointing out the exposed front end, but also disagreed with the way the researchers characterized their discovery in a blog post published Tuesday.
The company said that it has no active contracts with any US government agency, and said the website in question was a test environment set up as part of its ongoing effort to achieve FedRAMP authorization to sell its products to the US government. Persona told The Register that its plans with the US government are limited to workforce verification that would ensure the feds are hiring who they think they’re hiring.
Discord noted in today’s blog post that it had partnered with Persona when it was evaluating age verification partners, but only ran a brief test with the company in January that was limited to the UK. After the testing period concluded, Discord decided not to move forward with Persona as a partner.
“We’ve set a new bar for any partner offering facial age estimation, including that it must be performed entirely on-device, meaning your biometric data never leaves your phone,” Vishnevskiy wrote. “Persona did not meet that bar.”
Noting the word “including” in Vishnevskiy’s statement, we asked both Persona and Discord if that meant there were other concerns with Persona’s systems that inspired Discord’s rejection. Persona told us that it didn’t want to speculate on Discord’s internal decision making, and Discord declined to elaborate.
Discord plans to pull the trigger om the system in the second half of this year, the company said.
“We’re listening. We’ll get this right. And when we ship, you’ll be able to see for yourselves,” Vishnevskiy asserted. ®