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Discord distances from age verification firm after ties to Peter Thiel surface

227 points by thisislife2 8mo ago

anonymous_user9 8mo ago
Notably, by doing this Discord lied in their initial announcement. They originally said [1] that all processing would be on-device, but that's not true for users subject to this "experiment". 1: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...
- Morromist 8mo ago
  As Argento Dragone said in the Kotaku comments: "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?"
  - Hawxy 8mo ago
    > "By immediately I mean we send it to k-ID who said that's what they do." 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.
    - jacquesm 8mo ago
      Trust is fragile.
    - shakna 8mo ago
      After the last screwup, by the same company, why would you trust the data to stay on your device? > 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-incident-involving-third-party-customer-service https://discord.com/press-releases/update-on-security-incide...
    - toofy 8mo ago
      was it “uk only” or was it the only place that required them to notify users theyre being experimented on? 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.
    - cookiengineer 8mo ago
      Enter into Google: Discord breach october 2025 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?
    - rolymath 8mo ago
      What good does this do for people who have already had their faces enrolled in Thiel's venture now? "oh sorry, we said it's local but forgot to tell you about the experiment that sends you data to Thiel"
    - pavel_lishin 8mo ago
      How many people in how many countries does it take before the lie becomes sufficiently flagrant?
  - eterm 8mo ago
    And by "Deleted immediately" they might mean they delete the image but keep the hash.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
- delecti 8mo ago
  I don't want to defend Discord, but that's just not true. That announcement did not say all processing would be on-device, only when you use the face scan. > 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.
  - anonymous_user9 8mo ago
    Ah, I assumed that Persona is being used for face scans too. I haven't been able to find a screenshot of the actual flow, but based on this article [1] with a screenshot of the message UK users are receiving, I suspect they are: >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-may-be-part-of-an-experiment-where-instead-of-their-age-verification-data-never-leaving-their-phone-it-will-now-actually-leave-their-phone https://www.eurogamer.net/discord-advises-uk-users-that-they...
deaux 8mo ago
Article title, which was a lot clearer than this one: "Discord Distances Itself From Age Verification Firm After Ties To Palantir’s Peter Thiel Surface" Not sure why you changed it but it makes quite the difference to the meaning.
- mhitza 8mo ago
  That's too long of a title for a HN submission, i think.
  - mvdtnz 8mo ago
    Ok but this title is literally fake news.
    - input_sh 8mo ago
      Feel free to suggest a better one that can fit into 80 characters!
      - stavros 8mo ago
        "Discord Distances Itself From Age Verification Firm After Palantir ties"?
    - Angostura 8mo ago
      No. It’s literally has exactly the same meaning.
gethly 8mo ago
Too late. Trust is gone.
- globalnode 8mo ago
  Not trusting should be you're default stance. Then you can be pleasantly surprised when they do the right thing.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
tjpnz 8mo ago
Is this the same Peter Thiel who gives lectures on Greta Thunberg being the literal anti-christ?
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
- delaminator 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - ThatMedicIsASpy 8mo ago
    You are seeing quotes where there are none. Every billionaire has massive mental health issues.
  - konradb 8mo ago
    Maybe you can help me out, I listened to him talk about this and I couldn't make head-nor-tail of what he was trying to say. It feels like he's so tied up in concepts and metaphors and similes and allegories it's impossible to tell specifically what he is asserting to be true. If you could explain to me like I was five I'd be grateful. Not looking for an argument.
  - stavros 8mo ago
    If someone is saying that there are literal actuql existing legionnaires of the literal actual existing antichrist, and X person is one of them, it's not the "X person is one of them" part that I have an issue with.
    - delaminator 8mo ago
      The issue you have is that "literal" is doing all the work for you.
PostOnce 8mo ago
I very hesitantly used discord occasionally because some projects I wanted to keep up with moved there 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.
rockskon 8mo ago
"Discord Distances itself from Peter Thiel's Palantir Age Verification Firm" means jack shit if they're still doing business with them. 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.
- notyourwork 8mo ago
  Ding ding ding. Matter of time, this is merely damage control until the news cycle fades into the next.
- hinata08 8mo ago
  To do the Simpsons quotes like suggested in the article, Discord picking age verification "third party providers" definitely looks like they park various vans across the street. One of them didn't delete IDs properly and leaked them. 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.
  - sinnsro 8mo ago
    Executives who focus on the financial side of things and do not care about correctness in operations are the ones steering lots of companies nowadays. Boeing is a good example/case study on how financialisation eats up companies from the inside by emphasising monetary results over actual engineering.
  - temp84858696945 8mo ago
    I get the feeling they do not in fact take age verification seriously and just want to do the low effort solution needed to satisfy various countries laws.
OutOfHere 8mo ago
The risk in effect is that every message sent on Discord will make its way to Palantir with copy of your ID. This is not a risk that any user should accept. Discord fooled its users once, and it should not be trusted to not fool them again.
- aenis 8mo ago
  And because of how broadly and frequently people use Discord, it will be super useful when correlating with other data feeds. That might be even more valuable than the discord activity itself.
yesbut 8mo ago
Nobody believes that.
smashah 8mo ago
"Distances itself" lol what does that even mean? Did they step back from the admin console or something?
KingMob 8mo ago
Oh, the irony of Peter Thiel being involved in age verification, after lunching with Epstein (post-conviction).
- ozmodiar 8mo ago
  And given his penchant for information control, I dont doubt he knew everything that was going on.
uyzstvqs 8mo ago
Can't we just do this age verification locally on-device? Just some WASM to run a small AI model, which scans face+ID. I know it'll be easier to bypass, but that does not matter. We're trying to stop children, not adults with technical skill.
- jasonvorhe 8mo ago
  It's not about age verification but control and digital id.
  - phatfish 8mo ago
    Doesn't everyone have a digital ID already? 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?
    - xinayder 8mo ago
      Restricting content you access, or using that to shape what is offered to you on the internet.
    - uyzstvqs 8mo ago
      Digital ID to interact with government services is great. It becomes a problem when they add something like OpenID4VC to it, with the intention of linking it to all your online activity for "age verification". This would create one giant government metadata silo on every individual's online activity.
nottorp 8mo ago
Who cares where they outsource the age verification to? 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.
- troupo 8mo ago
  > 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 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo
  - booi 8mo ago
    That’s only 100% tho
- Neywiny 8mo ago
  That's what gets me too. It feels so easy. Just don't store the source data. They usually say they don't, they claim it's deleted quickly or never saved to disk at all or other stuff and its always lies. Just don't save it and there's no attack vector. Same thing with plaintext passwords. The amount of password leak attacks I've seen in recent years is 0 (though I'm sure they're still around). Stored IDs and PII for verification is uncountable
  - rawgreaze 8mo ago
    The trick is that they delete the actual image of the face, but the embeddings (which can reconstruct the face anyway) are saved permanently onto their servers. You don't own your embeddings, and they never delete them.
    - Neywiny 8mo ago
      Yeah let's trust them this time. Nobody's ever lied about that in the past and there's never been a breach of data that reportedly didn't exist. I'm sure this time it'll work out
  - 8mo ago
jmyeet 8mo ago
One of the most destructive ideas of the last century in the West (particularly the US) has been the idea that private industry is a better replacement for the government to provide services. 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-takeover https://jacobin.com/2025/08/private-equity-minnesota-power-t... [2]: https://appinchina.co/blog/the-complete-guide-to-chinas-age-verification-system/ https://appinchina.co/blog/the-complete-guide-to-chinas-age-... [3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-social-media.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-s... [4]: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/10/google-sent-personal-and-financial-information-of-student-journalist-to-ice/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/10/google-sent-personal-and-f... [5]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/13/lifetouch-epstein-files-school-photos-leon-black-apollo/88661298007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/13/lifeto...
JoeDohn 8mo ago
They did test the water, they will be back at it again. We have seen this over and over. If you use that bloated software, time to move.
- api 8mo ago
  It’s a network. You can move but will your community? 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.
  - rawgreaze 8mo ago
    >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.
    - api 8mo ago
      Hindsight is 20/20. We didn’t realize just how powerful it would be. Same with addictive stuff like engagement maxxing algorithms and infinite scroll. Now the new challenge is to figure out how to put those dogs down. This always happens.
    - xethos 8mo ago
      We have that today though - it's called Matrix. While other platforms aren't literally built upon it like Hangouts was in the beforetimes, it allows inter-op with more platforms. Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Google Chat (née Google Hangouts)... and those are just the ones I'm using. The full list includes more [0] 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. [0] https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/ https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
JPKab 8mo ago
[flagged]
- QuadmasterXLII 8mo ago
  You should seriously consider believing Mr. Thiel when he named the company Palantir.
7373737373 8mo ago
Who owns Discord?
h4kunamata 8mo ago
Skype 3.0 is here folks. 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.
joquarky 8mo ago
Why can't we just write a nice IRC client?
HASPOTS 8mo ago
HELLO

227 points by thisislife2 8mo ago

Notably, by doing this Discord lied in their initial announcement. They originally said [1] that all processing would be on-device, but that's not true for users subject to this "experiment". 1: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...

Morromist 8mo ago
As Argento Dragone said in the Kotaku comments: "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?"
- Hawxy 8mo ago
  > "By immediately I mean we send it to k-ID who said that's what they do." 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.
  - jacquesm 8mo ago
    Trust is fragile.
  - shakna 8mo ago
    After the last screwup, by the same company, why would you trust the data to stay on your device? > 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-incident-involving-third-party-customer-service https://discord.com/press-releases/update-on-security-incide...
  - toofy 8mo ago
    was it “uk only” or was it the only place that required them to notify users theyre being experimented on? 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.
  - cookiengineer 8mo ago
    Enter into Google: Discord breach october 2025 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?
  - rolymath 8mo ago
    What good does this do for people who have already had their faces enrolled in Thiel's venture now? "oh sorry, we said it's local but forgot to tell you about the experiment that sends you data to Thiel"
  - pavel_lishin 8mo ago
    How many people in how many countries does it take before the lie becomes sufficiently flagrant?
- eterm 8mo ago
  And by "Deleted immediately" they might mean they delete the image but keep the hash.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
delecti 8mo ago
I don't want to defend Discord, but that's just not true. That announcement did not say all processing would be on-device, only when you use the face scan. > 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.
- anonymous_user9 8mo ago
  Ah, I assumed that Persona is being used for face scans too. I haven't been able to find a screenshot of the actual flow, but based on this article [1] with a screenshot of the message UK users are receiving, I suspect they are: >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-may-be-part-of-an-experiment-where-instead-of-their-age-verification-data-never-leaving-their-phone-it-will-now-actually-leave-their-phone https://www.eurogamer.net/discord-advises-uk-users-that-they...

deaux 8mo ago

Article title, which was a lot clearer than this one: "Discord Distances Itself From Age Verification Firm After Ties To Palantir’s Peter Thiel Surface" Not sure why you changed it but it makes quite the difference to the meaning.

mhitza 8mo ago
That's too long of a title for a HN submission, i think.
- mvdtnz 8mo ago
  Ok but this title is literally fake news.
  - input_sh 8mo ago
    Feel free to suggest a better one that can fit into 80 characters!
    - stavros 8mo ago
      "Discord Distances Itself From Age Verification Firm After Palantir ties"?
  - Angostura 8mo ago
    No. It’s literally has exactly the same meaning.

gethly 8mo ago

Too late. Trust is gone.

globalnode 8mo ago
Not trusting should be you're default stance. Then you can be pleasantly surprised when they do the right thing.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]

tjpnz 8mo ago

Is this the same Peter Thiel who gives lectures on Greta Thunberg being the literal anti-christ?

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
delaminator 8mo ago
[flagged]
- ThatMedicIsASpy 8mo ago
  You are seeing quotes where there are none. Every billionaire has massive mental health issues.
- konradb 8mo ago
  Maybe you can help me out, I listened to him talk about this and I couldn't make head-nor-tail of what he was trying to say. It feels like he's so tied up in concepts and metaphors and similes and allegories it's impossible to tell specifically what he is asserting to be true. If you could explain to me like I was five I'd be grateful. Not looking for an argument.
- stavros 8mo ago
  If someone is saying that there are literal actuql existing legionnaires of the literal actual existing antichrist, and X person is one of them, it's not the "X person is one of them" part that I have an issue with.
  - delaminator 8mo ago
    The issue you have is that "literal" is doing all the work for you.

PostOnce 8mo ago

I very hesitantly used discord occasionally because some projects I wanted to keep up with moved there 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.

rockskon 8mo ago

"Discord Distances itself from Peter Thiel's Palantir Age Verification Firm" means jack shit if they're still doing business with them. 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.

notyourwork 8mo ago
Ding ding ding. Matter of time, this is merely damage control until the news cycle fades into the next.
hinata08 8mo ago
To do the Simpsons quotes like suggested in the article, Discord picking age verification "third party providers" definitely looks like they park various vans across the street. One of them didn't delete IDs properly and leaked them. 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.
- sinnsro 8mo ago
  Executives who focus on the financial side of things and do not care about correctness in operations are the ones steering lots of companies nowadays. Boeing is a good example/case study on how financialisation eats up companies from the inside by emphasising monetary results over actual engineering.
- temp84858696945 8mo ago
  I get the feeling they do not in fact take age verification seriously and just want to do the low effort solution needed to satisfy various countries laws.

OutOfHere 8mo ago

The risk in effect is that every message sent on Discord will make its way to Palantir with copy of your ID. This is not a risk that any user should accept. Discord fooled its users once, and it should not be trusted to not fool them again.

aenis 8mo ago
And because of how broadly and frequently people use Discord, it will be super useful when correlating with other data feeds. That might be even more valuable than the discord activity itself.

yesbut 8mo ago

Nobody believes that.

smashah 8mo ago

"Distances itself" lol what does that even mean? Did they step back from the admin console or something?

KingMob 8mo ago

Oh, the irony of Peter Thiel being involved in age verification, after lunching with Epstein (post-conviction).

ozmodiar 8mo ago
And given his penchant for information control, I dont doubt he knew everything that was going on.

uyzstvqs 8mo ago

Can't we just do this age verification locally on-device? Just some WASM to run a small AI model, which scans face+ID. I know it'll be easier to bypass, but that does not matter. We're trying to stop children, not adults with technical skill.

jasonvorhe 8mo ago
It's not about age verification but control and digital id.
- phatfish 8mo ago
  Doesn't everyone have a digital ID already? 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?
  - xinayder 8mo ago
    Restricting content you access, or using that to shape what is offered to you on the internet.
  - uyzstvqs 8mo ago
    Digital ID to interact with government services is great. It becomes a problem when they add something like OpenID4VC to it, with the intention of linking it to all your online activity for "age verification". This would create one giant government metadata silo on every individual's online activity.

nottorp 8mo ago

Who cares where they outsource the age verification to? 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.

troupo 8mo ago
> 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 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo
- booi 8mo ago
  That’s only 100% tho
Neywiny 8mo ago
That's what gets me too. It feels so easy. Just don't store the source data. They usually say they don't, they claim it's deleted quickly or never saved to disk at all or other stuff and its always lies. Just don't save it and there's no attack vector. Same thing with plaintext passwords. The amount of password leak attacks I've seen in recent years is 0 (though I'm sure they're still around). Stored IDs and PII for verification is uncountable
- rawgreaze 8mo ago
  The trick is that they delete the actual image of the face, but the embeddings (which can reconstruct the face anyway) are saved permanently onto their servers. You don't own your embeddings, and they never delete them.
  - Neywiny 8mo ago
    Yeah let's trust them this time. Nobody's ever lied about that in the past and there's never been a breach of data that reportedly didn't exist. I'm sure this time it'll work out
- 8mo ago

jmyeet 8mo ago

One of the most destructive ideas of the last century in the West (particularly the US) has been the idea that private industry is a better replacement for the government to provide services. 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-takeover https://jacobin.com/2025/08/private-equity-minnesota-power-t... [2]: https://appinchina.co/blog/the-complete-guide-to-chinas-age-verification-system/ https://appinchina.co/blog/the-complete-guide-to-chinas-age-... [3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-social-media.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-s... [4]: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/10/google-sent-personal-and-financial-information-of-student-journalist-to-ice/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/10/google-sent-personal-and-f... [5]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/13/lifetouch-epstein-files-school-photos-leon-black-apollo/88661298007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/02/13/lifeto...

JoeDohn 8mo ago

They did test the water, they will be back at it again. We have seen this over and over. If you use that bloated software, time to move.

api 8mo ago
It’s a network. You can move but will your community? 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.
- rawgreaze 8mo ago
  >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.
  - api 8mo ago
    Hindsight is 20/20. We didn’t realize just how powerful it would be. Same with addictive stuff like engagement maxxing algorithms and infinite scroll. Now the new challenge is to figure out how to put those dogs down. This always happens.
  - xethos 8mo ago
    We have that today though - it's called Matrix. While other platforms aren't literally built upon it like Hangouts was in the beforetimes, it allows inter-op with more platforms. Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Google Chat (née Google Hangouts)... and those are just the ones I'm using. The full list includes more [0] 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. [0] https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/ https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

JPKab 8mo ago

[flagged]

QuadmasterXLII 8mo ago
You should seriously consider believing Mr. Thiel when he named the company Palantir.

7373737373 8mo ago

Who owns Discord?

h4kunamata 8mo ago

Skype 3.0 is here folks. 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.

joquarky 8mo ago

Why can't we just write a nice IRC client?

HASPOTS 8mo ago

HELLO