Hot take: I actually agree with this as a former Discord user.
Discord was never supposed to be privacy friendly and anybody that uses it should not expect any sort of confidentiality regarding their messages.
It should be viewed as another form of Telegram, where it behaves like a social media platform rather than a messenger. As much as I hate age verification mandates, the amount of illegal content disseminating in Discord is absurd.
If you want a private and secure Discord alternative, Matrix works just fine. At least children are less likely to use that and Signal compared to Discord.
Illegal content is an understatement. It depends on your point of view, what’s going to happen is that people will turn to Matrix (Element) instead of Discord, we’re just displacing the problem as usual.
I generally agree but my main counterpoint is that those apps are much harder to use for most children anyways.
As a former discord user I’ll take it into granted.
But if people have learned to swerve Chinese law by taking someone’s like their parent’s IDs to bypass it or something then I get a bad feeling for this one, The false positive especially where the facial recognition could think you’re young but you’re actually not.
It’s why later the bypass was made, China mandated both face scan and IDs.
Wonder if it can detect AI-generated faces. 
I don’t think its reasonable to expect someone to give up any expectations of privacy just because a tool was not initially built for privacy. This line of thinking, to me, is to quick to accept that since a company or software did not intend to be privacy friendly that we should allow them to be anti-privacy. I think this type of stance can lead to a slippery slope of companies being allowed to avoid any ethical responsibility towards their users because “its not what we intended the platform for”.
I also tend to agree with the EFF that these types of technologies are more harmful and creepy then effective.
For sure! I am going to concede here on the basis that the technology itself is quite harmful and shouldn’t be normalized.
I just wish there was a way to protect minors from this stuff. The amount of horrible things I’d heard happen in some servers can’t be ignored.
At the end of day, parents must be a bit more proactive in teaching their children to be cautious when using the internet.
maybe making things tokenized, but as you said in the end of all this, it is the responsibility of the parents not the platforms, but it has become to the point many parents are careless or otherwise clueless and stuff like that get away. So I really dont think your hot take was bad but we have to acknowledge the downsides coming from this and the potential better solutions.
But hey if it means that most discord users will concede to revolt, matrix or otherwise (as long as they’re 13 or over or more importantly 16-18 or over) that’s a win in my book.
You can use blind signatures to verify that a user is above a certain age without identifying them, it’ll just take time to implement such a system on a government scale. The government clearly aren’t interested in doing that and would rather jump the gun and violate the privacy of everyone.
turn my “tokenized” statement into this reply
In scandavia they use bank id to verify ownership and age. I can imagine there can be something similiar that can be used for age verification that doesn’t require intrusive image verification.
The USA used similar technology in the middle east to identify terrorists with many false flags leading to innocents being incarcerated.
It’s still pretty damaging to privacy, your bank id is basically the same as your normal ID. Chances are you pay for deliveries with the card so tying it to your real identity is trivial.
to be fair, If you’re already trusting your bank, what could be the catch?
With that being said a system like what @fria said would be far more private…
I agree it isn’t as private but since it is already a well controlled system including GDPR rules, this is at least better than facial scans in my opinion.
This is absurd on its face.
It wont solve the grooming problem or minors trading p*rn. The only thing this will do is restrict channels from them EXPLICITLY marked as NSFW. Don’t conflate CSAM and regular adult content. This is implemented SPECIFICALLY for stopping minors from seeing LEGAL adult material thats posted in public.
This is just a guess, but if Discord have access to your card number, they could ask other “partners” if they know the real identity (or maybe an email) of user with card number ending with [card number 4 digits].
Of course maybe they could do a blind system where the bank only provides a “Age is OK” token. But then you could use any bank card from relative or friends.
It’s a real shame because the technology is genuinely really cool. I think even people who aren’t the slightest bit interested in technology and cryptography would find it pretty cool if you could walk into a bar and simply verify that you are over the legal drinking age without providing anything else.