Discord Age Verification Rolls Out Today With Changes Spurred by User Backlash

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

Discord will try to automatically estimate ages, require verification when it can't:

Discord today [Sept. 23] is rolling out an age-verification system that estimates each user's age and requires some users to prove they are old enough to access age-restricted content. Discord said it will take a few days for the global system to reach all user accounts.

Discord had announced a somewhat different plan for age checks in February, but scrapped it amid backlash from users concerned about privacy. The privacy concerns were heightened by a 2025 incident in which hackers stole government IDs of 70,000 Discord users from a third-party service that Discord used to verify ages in the UK and Australia.

The original plan was to require ID uploads or face scans from users seeking to access age-restricted servers and channels. The revised system, detailed yesterday by Discord CTO and co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy, will provide several additional options.

"In February, the only methods we'd planned for to confirm your age were facial age estimation or an ID scan. Based on your feedback, we committed to giving you more options that meet our high privacy standards," Vishnevskiy wrote.

A Discord system will automatically estimate user ages and place each user into an adult age group (18+), a teen group (13-17), or an "unconfirmed" group for which there isn't enough data to determine whether a person is an adult or teen.

[...] Discord estimates that more than 90 percent of users will not be asked to confirm their age. Adults who want to access age-restricted content, but are incorrectly placed in the 13-17 age group or put into "unconfirmed," will have several options to prove they are old enough.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.