Messaging platform Discord’s efforts to roll out age verification software have been nothing short of a disaster.
Back on February 9, the company announced that it was launching “enhanced teen safety features” that would require underage users across the world to have their faces scanned or upload a form of ID.
The news led to a massive outcry, with privacy advocates arguing the effort could easily backfire, allowing extremely sensitive data to leak into the wrong hands. Case in point, Discord had already drawn plenty of criticism in October after admitting that a “third-party service provider” had leaked ID photos of around 70,000 users following a cyberattack.
Users also heavily criticized the company’s brief partnership with Persona, a Peter Thiel-backed age verification provider. The enormous amount of backlash that ensued led Discord to wipe any mentions of the company’s name from its support page last week, as The Verge reported on Monday.
Adding insult to injury, Discord was swept into the next controversy after nearly 2,500 files associated with Persona’s facial recognition checks were made publicly accessible on a US government-authorized endpoint, as The Rage reports, revealing “extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users, bundled in an interface that pairs facial recognition with financial reporting.”
The timing couldn’t have been worse, with the Department of Homeland Security already coming under fire this week for using facial recognition and license plate readers to surveil and threaten legal observers, according to a class action suit.
“Funny how that works,” a security researcher who goes by Celeste, who originally spotted the exposed files, wrote in a February 16 blog post on their website. “You hand over your passport to use a chatbot, and somewhere in a datacenter in Iowa, a facial recognition algorithm is checking whether you look like a politically exposed person.”
The enormous amount of bad press appears to have gotten to Discord’s leadership. After publicly severing ties with Persona, Discord CTO and cofounder Stanislav Vishnevskiy admitted in a blog post today that the company got it “wrong” and that it’s delaying its age verification rollout to the “second half of 2026” as a result.
“Let me be upfront: we knew this rollout was going to be controversial,” he wrote. “Any time you introduce something that touches identity and verification, people are going to have strong feelings. Rightfully so. In hindsight, we should have provided more detail about our intentions and how the process works.”
Vishnevskiy said that Discord will provide alternative ways for users to verify their age, such as “credit card verification,” which was already in development. A new “spoiler channel” option could also provide communities with a way to restrict certain discussions without having to “age-gate their server.”
The cofounder also said that Discord “decided not to move forward” with Persona after running a limited test in the UK only.
“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,” he wrote. “Persona did not meet that bar.”
In short, Discord’s hasty and reckless approach to rolling out age verification seems to have had the opposite of the intended effect: to protect its users. The disaster perfectly illustrates how difficult it is to meaningfully age-restrict access to platforms without potentially exposing highly sensitive government data to hackers.
It also goes to show how much sway the tech industry has, particularly in the United States, where meaningful regulation to protect underage users is nowhere to be found.
“We’ve made mistakes,” Vishnevskiy admitted. “I won’t pretend we haven’t. And I know that being a bigger company now means our mistakes have bigger consequences and erode trust faster. I don’t expect one blog post to fix that.”
However, the damage has already been done. Even before the latest leak was revealed, a major exodus of Discord users overwhelmed one of the platform’s rivals, TeamSpeak, last week, indicating users had already seen enough.
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