Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
And Discord has approached this in such a monstrously awful way that I don't know what they could possibly say at this point to make me believe them.
I fully expect Discord will buddy-buddy right back up with some other Thiel-affiliated company if there is a separation if not go right back to them once the heat dies down.
Now Peter Thiel's Age verification truck has been parked across the street for 2 weeks. How long does it take to deliver a pizza ?
They need to replace it with Flowers By Irene van ? Who wants to create that company and try to sell it ?
I'm dumbfounded that a big tech company that says they take age verification so seriously just subcontracts that part to this set of various subcontractor with no apparent vetting.
I do love Discord as a platform and I happily took subscriptions for me and some friends, but I don't understand who steers it.
They have no business keeping my ID scan or face in any case. Because there's an 120% chance they'll end up on a public S3 bucket.
They already ended up there: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo
Now all these sites are implementing face scans, which would be perfect for such criminals to harvest and use AI to create fake videos of you saying anything that suits them.
At what point does legislation step in, here? Because so far, it's only moved in the direction that worsens the issue.
Not sure why you changed it but it makes quite the difference to the meaning.
We are absolute slaves to network effects. How many things do you continue to use even though you hate them because everyone else also continues to use them even though most hate them?
Defeating the dragon of the network effect would be a great victory for human empowerment in the 21st century.
Creating the network effect was the greatest loss we had in the 21st century. We used to be able to use XMPP to talk to Google Hangouts, Facebook Messenger and all sorts, and they took it away, just so you'd have to use their shitty little program instead.
Now the new challenge is to figure out how to put those dogs down.
This always happens.
We can disagree about what counts as good enough for the mass market in the modern era, whether normal people will actually use this vs whether normal people used XMPP's interop in 2005, and quibble about feature sets (video calls weren't initially supported in '05, and most bridges don't support them today), but for chatting with friends, you still only need one app - and because Matrix is an open standard, you can even change which app you want it to be.
Post script: I look forward to hearing about how terrible Matrix was, last time someone tried the (over-crowded) default server 12-18 months ago. The software dev community here will follow up and say that software cannot have gotten better since then, either.
From a limited set of options.
My friends are the mass market. You and I are savvy, tech folks and we know what Matrix is. I've got friends who work as car mechanics, secretaries, teachers, etc. They're not dumb, they can spend the time to figure out which app will work best for them on their computers and phones, but they don't particularly want to spend their time fiddling with software on their computer. I love them, and they love me, but do they love me enough to go through this rigamarole just to share Star Trek memes and talk about our days?
For all its faults, Discord is easy, and it's good. They've put in a lot of polish, and it just works, and it's well supported. Convincing them to move away means that at best, I'm taking on the role of tech support for... potentially dozens of people? Except it won't be that many, because I doubt that many of them will move.
Discord will have to get catastrophically bad before they strongly consider moving off of it, and I would bet you twenty US dollary-doos that the first place we'll move to will be Slack.
Network effects, man.
I'm not on mastodon but I've perused some threads and if it brings value to people great - the fact that it was there when twitter imploded means some portion of the population actually moved to it and now uses it. It provided some real value to people.
Kind of, but in the past. It isn't good for today's web, otherwise we wouldn't be in this discussion.
Edit - I searched to refresh myself, ok he didn't say she was the literal antichrist. He said she's literally a legionnaire for the literal antichrist. I cannot stress enough that he was very clear that he was not using these terms figuratively, I mean "literal" in the literal sense of the term.
"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." 2009
He is just executing on this, and some of religious technocratic nonsense beliefs just leaked a bit.
I am now going to sit here and listen to this talk because I guarantee it's not saying what you think it's saying. And I don't want to listen to it. It's not a topic that interests me. But I guarantee you are completely distorting what was stated in that topic for maximum effect, entirely motivated by left-wing politics.
In your post you state you are ‘not sure’, but also that that the poster is ‘wrong’.
> My thesis is that in the 17th, 18th century, the antichrist would have been a Dr Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science. In the 21st century, the antichrist is a luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer.
Sure, he eventually goes on to say stuff like..
> One of the ways these things always get reported is, I denounce Greta as an antichrist. And I want to be very clear: Greta is, I mean she’s maybe sort of a type or a shadow of an antichrist of a sort that would be tempting. But I don’t want to flatter her too much. So with Greta, you shouldn’t take her as the antichrist for sure. With AOC, you can choose whether or not you want to believe this disclaimer that I just gave
But I don’t think this is the win that you might think it is. The dude is a loon.
Weird that you seem to support this administration that Thiel is very much associated with but find it offensive when there's a very clear association between Thiel and Garry. He's just going to this specific church to pray or whatever? Paying no mind to the anti-christ talk happening next door. I do hope this is the last breaths of religion in the western world, it needs to die.
I'm not religious, and hate religious radicals, but ideologues act identically, just with secular idols. I didn't see that until I watched what the leftist ideologies did to the quality of life in two places I used to live in:
SF and Boulder.
I'm a 2012 Democrat, which makes me a fascist to a 2026 Democrat.
I mean, if we're going to make accusations based on perceived political tribal allegiances, I can say to you with equal certainty that you're a neo-Marxist.
Of course I don't know that. And you don't know anything about me.
300 years into the future some historian will publish a book: "The downfall of the USA traced back to the PayPal Mafia".
Truths are always somewhere in the middle.
The problem these days is we give fruitcakes a stage. Or they buy one.
Does research and now admits that he wasn't right, and understands why he and others were being down voted and hopefully learns from this and moves on.
Kudos for the edit and honesty: it's rare to see learning actually happen in fiery threads! I've been in your shoes and learning and change is possible.
1: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...
"Face scanning is used to do ID verification on your device and then deleted immediately."
"By immediately I mean we send it to k-ID who said that's what they do."
"By that I mean they partnered with Persona to do the actual verification."
"Persona clarified that by 'immediately' they mean 'after seven days.'"
"And given their ties to Palantir, it's probably fine. You trust us, right?"
People have already validated this fyi. When k-ID was first added you could send a bogus age result to discord from your local device, which probably still works. There's no evidence your facial scans leave the device.
> "By that I mean they partnered with Persona to do the actual verification."
Which isn't true, it was a UK-only experiment being run for a small subset of users, which has now been discontinued.
I get people are outraged, but this is sensationalism at best.
> Of the accounts impacted globally, we have identified approximately 70,000 users that may have had government-ID photos exposed, which our vendor used to review age-related appeals.
And by same company, I don't mean discord. I mean Persona.
https://discord.com/press-releases/update-on-security-incide...
we know US law allows tech companies to experiment on us without notifying at all. facebook was caught experimenting on users to see if a timeline full of sad posts would cause the users to become depressed.
im guessing his companies will get ahold of discord users data in most other countries. i’d be shocked if he only wants data from a tiny number of UK people.
Discord probably still claims they weren't hacked. How they handle incidents like this matters to a lot of folks, and that's what this is about.
3 months after a major breach, how could anybody possibly believe that they fixed all their wrong organizational policies and security measurements within that time, while still not even acknowledging the incident?
"oh sorry, we said it's local but forgot to tell you about the experiment that sends you data to Thiel"
> Video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user’s device
> Facial scans never leave your device. Discord and our vendor partners never receive it.
Meanwhile they're also clear that uploaded IDs do get sent to "partners":
> Quick deletion: Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.
>The information you submit will be temporarily stored for up to 7 days, then deleted. For ID document verification, all details are blurred except your photo and date of birth... [emphasis mine]
To me, that implies that Persona is/was doing more than just IDs.
[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/discord-advises-uk-users-that-they...
I know it'll be easier to bypass, but that does not matter. We're trying to stop children, not adults with technical skill.
My passport has biometrics, the government knows everything about me already through the tax system which is "digital". All my other interactions with the government are through digital services.
What exactly would a digital ID allow a government to do that it can't already? Apart from solve all the issues with having to provide scans of (my already digital) ID documents to every bank/solicitor/mortgage broker/estate agent/etc i interact with, where in many my personal ID documents probably sit on a company file share or some random persons One Drive.
A government digital ID with a one-time code to complete verification would solve all of this nonsense.
On control, again, what possible super power would a "digital ID" give a government that it doesn’t have already to control you?
We aren't living with the internet of the 90's any more, it's now owned by corporations and bad actors. Yes, i know it's impossible to stop those that are determined to circumvent restrictions (just as can happen with alcohol or movies) but clear restrictions give parents that want to do the right thing cover when setting rules in their own family.
In the end society raises children not just individual parents, and society need to take some responsibility too.
Personally i don't see how an API call to complete a government ID verification could be used to create a giant "metadata silo", unless the companies using the API are voluntarily sending more data than some sort of one-time challenge token. If the companies are coerced into feeding the government with your account activity history, what is stopping the government forcing that to happen now without bothering to draw attention via a digital ID?
But that's no fun: can't assure control of the children (bad), monetization (even worse) not share with government (the worst, given the current administration).
[0] https://democrats.eu/en/protecting-minors-online-without-vio...
I don't understand. A simple if age<18 check is quite a lot easier to implement than doing age verification yourself, or even shopping it out to some other "partner".
What I meant is that it doesn't exist yet. It'd require operating systems, apps, browsers, etc, to all implement this system before a company like Discord can actually use it.
None of this matters anyway. If a 15yo boy wants to see boobs on the internet he's gonna find a way. There's so many ways to muck with the connection. Not to say these age verification checks work either; the recent usage of the Death Stranding character's face to bypass the checks is evidence of that.
The problem is, it doesn't give a legally-enforced monopoly to any rent seeking data brokers, and it doesn't act as a foot in the door for requiring government-ID attribution of all internet activity everywhere.
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...
Shows that it was certainly possible, so the question is: do you believe in the power of 4chan?
But you're on the right track.
I think of a solution like:
1. Browser does one-time age verification through 3rd party service, without disclosing any details about which sites you'll access.
2. Browser stores your age, signed by that service.
3. When a site requests it the browser passes that signed age over. The site simply has to check if it has a valid signature by a trusted authority's public key.
The browser could even use Palantir in this example - but they would never get any data about what users are accessing.
Though I'd prefer the way proposed by Mark Camilleri Gambin (EU politician). Have parents enable Child Mode during device setup, then expose `isMinor = true` to all websites and apps, require a parental control PIN to disable. This is a much better and cleaner solution. Requiring age verification of all adults gets it backwards.
Second one is a lot more sensible.
Unless you think of some extreme outliers. Most of these I met can't READ and follow the step by step procedure.
I gave up a few times since I kept getting autobanned by a broken algorithm (i.e., based on my ip or phone number, not anything I'd said) until I contacted their devs and they manually fixed it.
Obviously, I am never going to consider using discord again after this shit-tsunami. Back to irc and signal groups.
After Reddit API drama, a lot of people left it to avoid using its app and terrible position from the CEO. I am happy to be out of it to be honest, it is an utterly toxic place. Reddit is there but no longer what it used to be, I will call it Skype 2.0
Discord has been having a rough time, data breach recently and now this. After this massive backlash and how bad the company is involved into wrong doing, Skype 3.0 is strong on this.
We see this with Internet and telecoms service where municipal broadband dominates national ISPs at a fraction of the cost. We see the sell-off of utilities and water, which just leads to massive price hikes, so much so that private equity is getting in on utilities because it's a captive market [1]. All these privatization schemes (including so-called public-private "partnerships") are simply schemes to transfer wealth from the government to the wealthy. And the real problem is a huge number of people who will never benefit from any of this think this is a good idea.
The only entity who can be trusted for identity and age verification is the government. This is how it works in China [2]. I can already hear the cries of "we can't trust the government with that". We already do. Who do you think issues drivers licenses and SSNs?
Another like objection: "the government can monitor your activity". Um, they already do [3][4]. In some cases they're doing this voluntarily. An administrative subpoena is not enforceable. That requires a court order. Yet Google, as just one example, complied anyway.
A government, unlike private corporations, is accountable to its citizenry.
Let me give you a concrete example of how disturbing this all is. Leon Black was the CEO of Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm that owned Shutterfly. Shutterly owns Lifetouch, which is a company that manages school photos for children for a huge number of schools in the US. Leon Black has links to Jeffrey Epstein [5].
As of now, there's no concrete accusation of wrongdoing here or of information (such as stored photos) being passed to Epstein or affiliates. But do you want an unaccountable private company owned an Epstein affiliate having the names, school, age and photos of your children? Yeah, me neither, which is why now a bunch of schools are distancing themselves from Lifetouch. Investigations are ongoing.
As for Discord even doing age verification, there are two angles. The legal one is easy to dispense with. Countries like the UK require it. I'm surprised Discord escaped the Australia under 16 social media ban. I expect that to change. There's going to be more of this. And I understand why. Predators inhabit these spaces and Discord, unlike "public" social media platforms, seem to have way less monitoring and scrutiny of what goes on there.
The second angle is should you be able to remain anonymous online? Call it the ethical angle. Reasonable people can disagree here. I just don't think it matters because there will be increasing pressure for Discord and others toc omply with legislation.
[1]: https://jacobin.com/2025/08/private-equity-minnesota-power-t...
[2]: https://appinchina.co/blog/the-complete-guide-to-chinas-age-...
[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-s...
[4]: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/10/google-sent-personal-and-f...
[5]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/13/lifeto...