Discord Delays Global Age Assurance(discord.com)
discord.com
Discord Delays Global Age Assurance
https://discord.com/blog/getting-global-age-assurance-right-what-we-got-wrong-and-whats-changing
4 comments
Title is: Getting Global Age Assurance Right: What We Got Wrong and What's Changing
I can appreciate that Discord is dealing with a lot of sides on this issue, and this response seems well measured with meaningful changes to the roll-out. As someone who has been fretting about replacing Discord communities with an alternative, this makes me feel better over all.
measured and flavorless. As expected of a company trying to IPO.
I know my country is a circus right now, but I haven't forgotten the steps a "civilized" corporation does to creep into your privacy. This is just the first step: "It won't affect most of you don't worry. We pinky promise your data won't leak too".
I'm tired of words. I want actions taken. The current actions is "we will wait until it's too late and disassociate with any 3rd party that gets hacked". Doesn't really help now that my data is out there.
I know my country is a circus right now, but I haven't forgotten the steps a "civilized" corporation does to creep into your privacy. This is just the first step: "It won't affect most of you don't worry. We pinky promise your data won't leak too".
I'm tired of words. I want actions taken. The current actions is "we will wait until it's too late and disassociate with any 3rd party that gets hacked". Doesn't really help now that my data is out there.
Platforms almost always begin with "90% of users will never notice," then gradually expand scope as regulatory pressure, liability, and competition increase. We saw similar dynamics with real-name policies at Facebook: initially narrow safeguards become infrastructure.
Auditability, fraud prevention, enforcement reporting, etc, historically pushes platforms toward more persistent verification regimes.
"On-device only" promises often erode once regulatory audits demand server-side attestations.
This is the only thing these days that Apple gets right: they make it technically impossible to backdoor, not just promise that they won't.
The second-order effect is normalization. Once large platforms operationalize age assurance, regulators point to them as proof that stricter mandates are "feasible," accelerating a global compliance cascade. Smaller platforms then adopt similar systems to avoid liability.
In past cycles (COPPA, GDPR, cookie banners, payment KYC) the burden disproportionately favored incumbents who could afford compliance. The likely long-term equilibrium is a stratified internet where meaningful participation in adult spaces increasingly requires some portable proof-of-age token, whether nominally anonymous or not.
It's not that Discord is acting in bad faith, they are simply the first domino to fall in what will be yet another GDPR cookie banner, a further erosion of privacy, and another nail in the coffin of a free internet.
Discord should have just "poasted through it," Huberman-style, and the mob would move on to the next platform that will inevitably be forced to enact similar policies.