Discord Technical Director Stanislav Vishnevsky painted a big canvas and announced that starting tomorrow, September 24th, age verification will be launched in Messenger with grouping.
Back in March, Discord was supposed to be overhauled for nearly one-year-olds in the name of child protection, but users were hostile to the move, concerned about the safety of their profiles, especially given the questionable partners. Later Vishnevsky had to repent, reconsider his approach and postpone the implementation of the system.
So what do we have:
- 90% of community members do not need to confirm anything: Discord will evaluate the account’s registration date and other parameters/activity (no access to text messages or calls);
- Nothing will change for adults, but minors will only be protected from certain age-restricted content and messages from strangers will be separated into a separate section;
- For those who don’t want to show their face or show their ID, new verification methods have been added: credit card verification through Stripe, Apple App Store, Google Play Store, Google Wallet and AgeKey;
- Discord is committed to publicly disclosing every third-party age verification service provider and how they operate. They are obliged to store the data provided only for the time required for age verification and to permanently delete it as soon as the procedure is completed. Any partner that provides facial age estimation must ensure that it only performs this on the user’s device so that the biometric data never leaves the phone. Currently there are only k-IDs in the list;
- On some servers, age-restricted channels are used not to discuss pornographic content, but to discuss politics or heavy topics, so Discord previously introduced a spoiler feature that marked them as having optional access.
