YHK - yet another hacker news clone

An update on how we confirm your age group on Discord

68 points meetpateltech 4 hours ago 22 comments

Foskya 2 hours ago | parent

I actually like their implementation. I'm curious if it will be enough for governments, but it is nice that they are trying to persue a path without id checks

EmbarrassedHelp 1 hour ago | parent

They should not be trying to implement it globally. That is unacceptable.

dsr_ 1 hour ago | parent

All the available paths turn into:

- give us your ID

- give us your biometrics

- give somebody, not necessarily Discord, a valid credit card

That's sll of the paths.

nemomarx 1 hour ago | parent

If the account age estimation puts you in adult, it sounds like you don't need to do any of those?

I'd like to see details about their model there, but account age is at least better than a lot of systems like steam are doing for this.

wging 51 minutes ago | parent

Some of those details are available here: https://discord.com/safety/how-discord-estimates-age-without...

autoexec 12 minutes ago | parent

I think it's interesting they limit the types of content they use to determine your age. I'd guess they don't impose those same limitations when it comes to other uses (including targeted ads)

aDyslecticCrow 50 minutes ago | parent

This proposed solution does however allow quite liberal access to discord without confirming the age. If the implementation is as worded; then i would not see a reason to confirm my age at all.

The issue comes down to if governments accept such a (urgh) comparatively lax implementation. It's pretty clear to me that the primary purpose of these laws are entirely to... force all citizens to identify themselves across the internet for the purpose of profile building, and nothing to do with child safety.

So as implementations go; this one is pretty decent. We should stop governments from passing these darn laws though.

t0bia_s 24 minutes ago | parent

Sounds like scam.

shaoonb 1 hour ago | parent

Still required to use a video or ID card in the UK.

CaliforniaKarl 21 minutes ago | parent

A friend of mine, who lives in the UK, says that he's been offered the credit-card verification option.

esafak 1 hour ago | parent

I like that the dialog indicates the service provider. Thumbs up for transparency.

axus 1 hour ago | parent

There was a brief window where you could submit fake biometrics through a third-party site to verify age on Discord, pretty sure I got the link from hackernews.

That made me feel better that Discord didn't need to store my ID or video of my face, and was only storing the results of some analysis and not the inputs.

burningChrome 25 minutes ago | parent

When the social media ban went into effect in Australia last year, kids were submitting photos of their parents and dogs to get around the verification. Not sure how better or worse they've gotten, but the old adage of trying to keep things from kids only motivates them more to get around the limitations you put up.

For reference: https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/dog-photos-vpns-fake-ids-how...

rustcleaner 9 minutes ago | parent

> ... the old adage of trying to keep things from kids only motivates them more to get around the limitations you put up.

This will be a boon for FOSS.

rustcleaner 1 hour ago | parent

IRC plus GNU Jami are still freedom respecting zones! I sincerely hope all this age verification crap causes cypherpunk FOSS solutions to grow in popularity.

iwontberude 53 minutes ago | parent

Matrix has become invaluable for dozens of my hacker friends. We ditched Discord almost a year ago and we have no desire to go back. Besides having high quality e2ee voice/video/screensharing (thanks LiveKit), we collectively spend 10x less for the functionality and keep our data in Switzerland. No ads, no one getting their accounts hacked with QR codes, ultra-granular space/channel settings, multiple choices for client implementations, and end to end encryption enables sensitive discussions that would have previously been curtailed. The identity verification is greatly appreciated although our new users do have some issues getting set up with multiple devices, but it's no more complicated than multi-device WhatsApp. Matrix is ready for prime time.

rustcleaner 10 minutes ago | parent

Nice! Last time I used Matrix there was really no voice/video calling. I'll have to check it out again! :D

noosphr 12 minutes ago | parent

Just remember that systemd added age verification in Linux without anyone asking.

There are freedom respecting Linux projects, but those lead by redhat\ibm employees (past and present) don't.

rustcleaner 7 minutes ago | parent

It can be extricated, or bypassed. The benefits of FOSS are myriad.

ashleyn 26 minutes ago | parent

One major controversy I recall with VRchat's implementation of age assurance (via Persona) is that they retained identity of who you were after completing the process. Not who exactly, but your identity was hashed so that if the same person attempted to verify again they could tell who it is. This effectively meant one individual can have one validated account per lifetime. If the flakey AI moderation banned you for an emoji combination freshly deemed racist/etc, you effectively lost your only shot at a validated VRchat account forever.

This is an issue with age assurance that goes well beyond just verifying age, and is undoubtedly viewed as a fringe benefit of age assurance for those wishing to deanonymise the internet. There's obvious problems with this beyond just "can't ban evade anymore". Authorities or intelligence can run bulk hashes against sets of IDs to effectively deanonymise all accounts.

The question here is, does Discord do the same thing for any or all of the selected options? Or is identity data full well and truly purged once the outcome is determined - no hashing, nothing retained other than the result?

CaliforniaKarl 12 minutes ago | parent

A long time ago, I'd participate in things like CAcert in-person assurance, PGP key-signing, etc.. I think a model like that would've been useful here: An AgeKey issued/signed by two people. I think of it like a decentralized equivalent to someone's parents saying "Yeah, $CHILD is old enough", or to a cashier saying "This person obviously looks old".

peri-cl 6 minutes ago | parent

> "We're launching this over the course of this week, so it may take a few days to reach your account."

That's obviously not a technical requirement; they're doing this because they expect a large volume of negative publicity, and temporally staggering this rollout means users are less able to coordinate their angry social-media posts.

Same logic Reddit used in phasing out the rollout of their new login wall.