[Discord] Discord Launches Teen-by-Default Settings Globally

[sundancer 44315xp 2]

The tl;dr of it all: as of March 2026 Discord will assume all users be 13 year old teenagers and set profiles accordingly. If you want to be able to access “adult” or “non-teen” content you need to provide either:

Discord users can choose to use facial age estimation or submit a form of identification to its vendor partners, with more options coming in the future.

So either your face or your ID will be stored. And even with them claiming

Quick deletion: Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly

I won’t submit any documents. It’s never the question IF something gets leaked or misused. It’s always a question of WHEN. So now it will be up to the channel providers and admin to choose on how to make their channels. If that means that I will not be able to access some channels then that is what it is.

Source: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally

[pagan8th 14058xp 0]

Big Brother is watching you.

[grantinvanman 9584xp 1]

Yeah, read that yesterday. Solution: delete Discord.

nobody wants this.

[limburger 22407xp 0]

never mind that folk have been fooling this ‘face id’ stupidity with pictures from the internet …

btw: in the Netherlands is illegal to store copies of passports.

Only a few are allowed to do ask for an id like a passport (and none of them are chat apps … ).

They are forbidden to store anything other than that what type of id was used (ie : ‘passport’).
No details.

https://autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/themas/identificatie/paspoort-en-identiteitskaart

https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/identiteitsfraude/vraag-en-antwoord/ben-ik-verplicht-om-een-kopie-van-mijn-identiteitsbewijs-te-geven-aan-een-bedrijf

If you have to hand over a copy then you are supposed to use the official app, which does several things:
– hides information that isn’t allowed to be seen by the target
– adds a watermark

A photo is classified as a ‘special/unique’ property as it can be used to uniquely identify a person, which is why they get special treatment in the regulations dealing with privacy.

So … what Discord wants to do is technically illegal by default in the EU.

[grantinvanman 9584xp 1]

[limburger 22407xp 1]

also : Discord is an American corporation.

The patriot act already allowed them access to our data on their servers.
And with you-know-who running the show over there you’d be stupid to trust them with anything ever again.

[limburger 22407xp 1]

Discord is already in ‘full damage control’ mode as folk are cancelling their paid subscriptions or looking for alternatives.
A lot of the resentment has been building as Discord has been agressively tried to push their various paid services.

Article:
https://kotaku.com/discord-age-verification-ai-hack-nitro-boycott-2000667358

And if you were wondering how they are going to do this verification ?
The answer is simple: ‘AI’
or rather … they have been using your data to train their ‘AI’ without your explicit consent.

https://x.com/Vuthakral/status/2020893257987748166

And if this wasn’t bad enough news …

They have been selling your data already for over a year already :

https://lifehacker.com/tech/discord-data-sold-to-ai-and-law-enforcement

It is likely easy for Discord to claim ‘innocence’ as this was done by a third party that used bots to scrape data, but I’d argue that it still is Discords’ responsibility for making sure their ‘terms of service’ aren’t just words when it comes to the protection of its users.

It sucks to have to re-iterate the basic lessons about internet privacy from the early days:
never ever reveal personal details on the internet.

There is nothing to be gained by doing so.
If you have do reveal anything then do it on a ‘need to know’ basis only.
Omit anything that isn’t essential to the service provided.
And if you have to provide info … do not be afraid of faking it.
You cannot erase information once it has been uploaded to the internet.

Disposable accounts are your friend if you want to keep your identity secret and safe.
We don’t need to know your gender, religion, race, age or any other personal details.
There simply are too many bad folk out there who would abuse such facts to harass, blackmail and bully.
Companies definitely do not need any of that no matter how they like the pretend it is to ‘protect the kids’.

Having said that … this community does not contain such people, but it is better to be safe and assume the worst.
The site admins will help you should you need it.

Technical Support & Report Abuse

[avien 2088xp 2]

I thoroughly detest discord and am hopeful this will drive people back to forums (it won’t of course but a man can have dreams)

[sundancer 44315xp 0]

(it won’t of course but a man can have dreams)

Same

[kingthrall 24xp 0]

I keep hearing news about this but no alternatives provided. Anyone care to list a few that are not going to invade my privacy?

 

Not that I would ever give any personal info to discord, but they’re simply needs to be a viable alternative before I move everything over.

[sundancer 44315xp 0]

Depends on what you are looking for in regards of use case. Discord is (in parts) so successful because it merged different things.

Want a text based chat? IRC

Want a voice chat? Jabber(XMPP) or Teamspeak

Want video calls/conferencing? Here trouble lies. There are things that work (Nextcloud Talk, Jitsi and some others) but nothing as simple as “open discord and go”.

And because there is no “on size fits all” solution out there (yet) I guess the migration from discord will be “manageable”. We will have to wait and see.

[kingthrall]

I was looking into stoat. I’m not going to go scorched unless I find a decent alternative.

I think the in real chat is the big one for me, the gaming side of things with streaming don’t really care. It’s more about the communities that I have set up for war gaming including heaps of local clubs already set up on discord. I used to back in the day use msn messenger for my groups in aus 😂.

I think it’s more about being aware and prepared to move on if the community’s built start to taper away considerably due to overreaching policies .

• This reply was modified 5 days, 17 hours ago by kingthrall.

[sundancer 44315xp 1]

The weirdest thing about this all will be when we see if and how it affects servers like OTT. Only if they are set to “adult content” (or what ever discord will call it) non verified users will not be able to access them any more. Otherwise nothing will change. For now. I think. Maybe.

[limburger 22407xp 1]

What is happening to Discord is what has happened and will continue to happen to all ‘free’ variants of this kind of application and it’s because these companies will chase profit over customer friendly features any day of the week. There simply is too much money to be had by abusing the depedency they have created due to the fact that it required zero cost to start your own discord channel.

Folk migrated to Facebook, Reddit and related social media, because running your own servers was (a) expensive and (b) required technical knowledge (especially if you want to stop the inevitable spammers and other threats).

I think we should revert back to IRC. The protocol has plenty of open source clients and servers, which makes it next to impossible to monetize and abuse compared to propiety protocols like Discords’.

The various ‘federated’ open source alternatives might work, but at best it will scatter the communities that used to be as few will manage to hold on to all of their users.

Remember : if it is free then you most definitely are the product.
I’m kind of surprised Discord managed to last this long before the actual en-sh!tification happened.

It will be interesting to see what happens with practically all discord channels within our hobby that were not funded by companies.

@sundancer I thought only the mutunus-tutunus and ‘thras-talk’ channels are ‘adult content’ sections in OTT discord, but then Discord might want to err on the side of caution/greed (I bet they want to do more with the id-documents they’re getting their hands on as a result of this new ‘feature’).

So far the one thing delaying things has been the absolutely massive negative feedback.
There’s only two things to keep in mind:
– the amount of folk that will follow through on their plans will be small (internet communities are really bad at this boycott thing, and even fewer will go scorched earth)
– it will at best be a delay; They will attempt this again, except they will try to be less obvious

I’d recommend curating your own list of discord servers and see which one you ‘need’ and which ones you haven’t used at all.

[bvandewalker]

Being a Christian on the shady side of 35, I am cool being stuck with 13 year old kiddy pool settings of discord since most of the groups I am actively involved with aren’t really doing “adult” content.

Oh, and @limburger it isn’t that internet communities are bad at boycotting, in fact I would say the only communities really bad at it are “liberal” groups (because they basically act as advertisement) and wargamers (its a very small hobby that plays only a few games to one game).

• This reply was modified 4 days, 16 hours ago by bvandewalker.

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