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Discord doesn't deserve your unquestioning trust
Discord, a popular nonfree instant messaging and voice/video call social platform with more than 150 million active users each month has joined other social platforms in announcing an age identification policy. Age verification policies are promoted as being necessary for protecting kids and teens online, but in reality these policies force users of all ages to interact with nonfree, invasive programs. Discord's new age verification policy does not go against this worldwide trend, according to its new policy, which includes a background-running "age inference model" for confirming each user's age group:
"We leverage an advanced machine learning model developed at Discord to predict whether a user falls into a particular age group based on patterns of user behavior and several other signals associated with their account on Discord. We only use these signals to assign users to an age group when our confidence level is high; when it isn't, users go through our standard age assurance flow to confirm their age. We do not use your message content in the age estimation model."
Discord is asking users of all ages for a lot of information while offering very little reliable reassurance that their data won't be misused, or even what data will be gathered. It is unclear from Discord's press release which types of data will be collected and run through its "age inference model," if the same forms of data will be used for all users, or the maximum amount of data that could be examined automatically before requiring bio data or a government ID. Based on Discord's press release, it seems that not just a couple of data points will be run through its opaque age inference model but quite possibly a great majority of all behavior on the platform. Also notably absent from Discord's most recent press release is that there doesn't seem to be a way for users to opt-out of background data searching, other than to delete their accounts. The only choice offered to users so far is if they want to submit bio data or a government ID should they fail the automatic age verification process.
While Discord has stated it will publish a blog post explaining the mechanics behind its automatic age verification process, there is no telling how transparent the platform will be or when to expect this blog post.