Discord Set To Rollout Age Verification For Users Accessing Restricted Content

Starting early March this year, Discord will be requiring all of its users to verify their age if they intend to access restricted or sensitive content. This is part of the platform’s broader efforts to enhance online safety for teenagers, and under this new policy, all users will adhere to teen-appropriate content settings unless verified as an adult.

Discord To Enforce Age-Gating

Under the new default settings, there will be several restrictions unless the user is proven to be an adult: sensitive content will remain blurred, access to age-gated channels, servers, and application commands will be limited, message requests from unknown users will be routed to a separate inbox, and users will receive alerts when receiving friend requests from unfamiliar accounts. They also can’t modify certain communication settings or speak on ‘Stage’ in servers.

There are several ways users can verify their age, and for the initial rollout, they can choose between facial age estimation, or by submitting government IDs, with additional methods planned (there will be cases where users need more than one methods to confirm their age, Discord says). To prevent possible catfishing, Discord will also deploy an age inference system that operates in the background to help classify accounts as teen or adult, although it’s unclear what metrics will be used, and if privacy practices will be maintained while doing so.

On that subject, Discord promises the age assurance process is designed with privacy considerations, including strictly on-device processing for facial age estimation, immediate deletion of submitted identification data by vendors once the verification is complete, while a user’s verification status is not visible to other users. Once verification is completed, users will receive confirmation in the form of a direct message through Discord’s official account, and assigned age groups can be reviewed or appealed within account settings.

Now, while Discord has a good intent to keeping the internet safe, there’s always the issue of cyberattacks when sensitive info gets involved. To that end, it doesn’t help that the company was recently the subject of a data breach involving roughly 70,000 photo IDs, and while it could argue that the breach happened on a third-party vendor responsible for its customer service (which Discord has since stopped working with), Discord uses a third-party vendor for its age assurance system as well – who’s to say it’ll be safe to hand over IDs in this case, then?

Pokdepinion: I really hope the strict SOPs handling sensitive data is followed to the T if they’re going to implement this.