can somebody screenshot the article i cant read it
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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Privacy
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I'm not against age restrictions, but letting every site brew their own method is a really bad idea. I'm not going to upload my legal ID to every random site; that's a recipe for identity theft, and it's a really bad idea to teach people that that's normal or acceptable.
And age guessing through facial recognition is incredibly unreliable. My 16 year old son has already been accepted as 18+ somewhere. I had a full moustache at 14. Others are blessed with a babyface well into their 30s.
The only right way to do this, is if governments provide their citizens with an eID that any site can ask "is this person 18+?" and get an accurate answer without any other identifiable info. And if you don't want the government to know what sites you visit, have sites route the request through a proxy.
But instead everybody's got to cobble together their own improvised system that we just have to trust blindly is not going to sell our data.
and it’s a really bad idea to teach people that that’s normal or acceptable.
This is a point so few people mention. Normalising having to give up personal information online is such a dangerous thing to do and companies/governments that enforce this shit are setting people up to be scammed
if you don’t want the government to know what sites you visit, have sites route the request through a proxy.
I feel a proxy would not really make much of a difference. If the government keeps a mapping of which eID corresponds to each real person from their end (which they would do if they want to know what sites you visit) then they can simply request the services (and/or intermediaries) to provide account mapping of the eIDs (and they could mandate by law those records are kept, like they often do with ISPs and their IP addresses). The service might not know who that eID belongs to.. but the government can know it, if they want.
The government needs to want to protect your privacy. If the government really wants to know what sites you visit, there's no reason why they would want to provide you with a eID that is truly anonymous at all levels and that isn't really linked to you, not even in state-owned databases.
Of course, a government has many ways they can legislate your rights, freedom and privacy away. But if you want to do this in a way that preserves privacy, this is how you do it.
Of course the government knows who you are; they have to. They issue your ID, and that makes them the only organisation that can issue your eID. But a government that serves its people would provide this an a service, with the proxy, to ensure privacy is respected.
And of course with a warrant they can and should be able to demand access to the proxy's or the website's logs. But only with a warrant. That is the bar that the government should always have to clear before they can get access to any citizen's privacy.
And if you don't want the government to know what sites you visit, have sites route the request through a proxy.
Actually, no on the fly communication with the issuer is required for selective disclose. You just need a signed document with individually salted hashes of different properties and you can create a zero knowledge proof non-interactively. Zero knowledge meaning that truely nothing but the disclosed property (age > 18, County == DE, or whatever) is communicated to anyone.
Theres a lot of other cool stuff that can be done with zero knowledge digital identity wallets. You could for example hash your pubkey together with the service providers pk and disclose that as a per service ID, but not reveal your pk. This allows linkability within one service (as a login method for example) while preventing cross service linkability.
That prevents the site from knowing your identity, but I'm not convinced it prevents the government from knowing you visit the site. The government could keep track of which document corresponds to which individual whenever they issue / sign it.
So if the government mandated that each signed proof of "age>18" was stored by the service and mapped to each account (to validate their proof), then the government could request the service to provide them copy of the proof and then cross-check from their end which particular individual is linked to it.
Like I mentioned in a similar post, please look at this alternative: https://stoat.chat/
Seams cool, but why not matrix since matrix has different instances you can chose from.
forgot to add that one, my other post did include Matrix as well :)
Does this still require you to 'call' people to be in a voice channel? Or is it now similar to discord in that you join a channel and can hear anyone in it?
Well, time to dump Discord after I finish school.
Best thing you can do with discord? Uninstall it.
Of the accounts impacted globally, we have identified approximately 70,000 users that may have had government-ID photos exposed
I’m never doing this. I’ll pay someone else to verify my account before I upload my dox with these assholes.
I’m fine switching to an alternative, but I have seen no gaming companies linking anything else for their official “forums”
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Yeah, you go ahead & do that, & watch how many people will jump ship to other alternatives while you lose a lot of money & subscriptions, especially when you’ve been hacked before.
People have found other alternatives to TikTok, & they’ll do the same with Discord.
i wouldn't be so optimistic. normies have a tendency to accept quite a lot.
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I hope for once people would get together and drop Discord so that Discord would have to reverse this policy. So often, we the customers really have the power if we get together and act together. All these social networks are nothing without the contributions of the customers.
without the contributions of the ~~customers~~
Without the contributions of the product.
As the adage goes, if you're not paying for it (and often even when you are), you're not the customer.
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I don't trust discord with what little I formation I've gave them so far. Definitely not giving them my ID or a scan of my face.
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Lol, no thanks. I deleted this trash years ago and wish companies would stop using it for tech and customer support. “Join our discord channel!” - no.
Same here.
What about Fractal? It even have a flatpak https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/fractal
Fractal is not multiplatform (i.e. isn't available on Android and on iOS) and Matrix can be confusing to people not already familiar with it.
And no, a wall of text explaining what Matrix is won't help since most of Discord's users are teenagers with a very short attention span that don't read much (unless they're forced to by school).
Potential solution, may be controversial.
Just add a vertical video with Minecraft parkour or with CS surf on the bottom and a half naked woman from a freelance platform explaining what it is.
There are also Element and SchildiChat as alternative clients.
Finally my chance to quit?
Idk
That's a no go from here...
However, some users may not have to go through either form of age verification. Discord is also rolling out an age inference model that analyzes metadata like the types of games a user plays, their activity on Discord, and behavioral signals like signs of working hours or the amount of time they spend on Discord.>
that's probably not much better though. nothing good will come from discord scanning and judging everything we say on it.
is there a practical way to delete all your messages at once?
personally i'd also backup the messages before deleting, this works well https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter
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Dude my dnd campaign is run on Discord what the fuck. Do I need to start hosting open source voice and video chat?
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in other news: next month i will be attempting to bypass discord's "AI" powered security features. I expect to overcome them in 4 minutes with a pic of an ID i found on the internet
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Revolt! your time has come (though it has been renamed to Stoat; a name I very much dislike.
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Users who aren’t verified as adults will not be able to access age-restricted servers and channels, won’t be able to speak in Discord’s livestream-like “stage” channels, and will see content filters for any content Discord detects as graphic or sensitive.
Shrug
I'm not using discord for porn, so I'm not going to lose sleep. Will simply live with a "teen" account until my groups migrate to a better service.
But you'll get my biometrics from my cold dead hands.
They will also get warning prompts for friend requests from potentially unfamiliar users, and DMs from unfamiliar users will be automatically filtered into a separate inbox.
GOOD
Crazy they didn't implement this years ago. Discord is bloated with fake user spam.
So I get a free spam filter for not verifying? Guess I'm never verifying then, lol.
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On-device processing: Video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user’s device.
Quick deletion: Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.
Still a no for me for now, but a bit misleading: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally
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