Summary
- Discord has published a blog post stating it missed the mark with its previous age verification announcement.
- The company will still implement the changes, but will delay the rollout to put some additional measures in place.
- These measures include more verification options, on-device facial checks, spoiler channels, and greater transparency.
Earlier this month, Discord announced that it was implementing age verification measures globally. The backlash against this news was swift and harsh, and initially, Discord seemed to be doubling down and defending its decision.
Today, however, the company issued a new announcement admitting it may have gotten some things wrong and outlining how it would handle the rollout of age verification going forward.
Discord’s defense
The company says it’s sorry, really!
In the blog post, Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy outlined the reasons for the upcoming changes, how he feels the company missed the mark, and what they’re going to do going forward to try to regain trust (and probably a significant number of lost users and Nitro subscribers).
Vishnevskiy points out that 90% of users will never need to verify their age — they either never access age-restricted content, or the company’s automated age verification system will take care of it in the background. However, that statement highlights one of the problems with all this: that Discord is building a profile on users in order to estimate their age.
For its part, Discord says that it doesn’t read your messages to determine age. Instead, it uses “account-level signals” like account age and whether there’s a credit card on file.
Discord also highlighted that it is taking vendor partnerships very seriously, especially in light of the major data breach last year. The company claims it has set a higher bar for data privacy with any vendors it works with. For example, it claims its vendors can’t associate data with your account, and that it has strict data removal requirements for vendors. However, it is still using third-party vendors, which adds an additional source of potential data leaks.
Here’s how Discord is responding to backlash
Will it be enough to win back trust?
At the end of the day, Discord is still moving forward with the age verification system previously outlined. However, the global launch will be delayed six months to give the company time to implement some measures that it hopes will rebuild user trust.
Here are the measures Discord is taking:
- Adding additional verification options — the one mentioned in the post is credit card verification.
- Providing more transparency around vendors and requiring that any vendor who uses facial age estimation do it entirely on-device.
- Adding a new spoiler channel feature so that communities don’t need to use age-restricted channels for things like spoilers.
- Publishing a detailed technical outline of how the automated age determination system works.
- Adding age assurance info to company transparency reports.
At first glance, this doesn’t seem like enough to relieve concerns about data privacy. The spoiler channels are a good idea, though. If you’re still looking for Discord alternatives, we’ve rounded up three of our favorites.
I’ll be honest — I think Discord is in a tough position. The idea of safeguarding younger users is a noble one. It’s also become a legal requirement in a growing number of countries. However, there are some major privacy pitfalls involved that the company will have to navigate, and it doesn’t seem to be doing that very well.
Whether apologies and added transparency are enough to appease Discord’s user base will remain to be seen.
