Discord faces backlash over age checks after data breach exposed 70,000 IDs

“If we have a high confidence that they are an adult, they will not have to go through the other age verification flows,” Badalich said.

Badalich confirmed that Discord is bracing for some users to leave Discord over the update but suggested that “we’ll find other ways to bring users back.”

On Reddit, Discord users complained that age verification is easy to bypass, forcing adults to share sensitive information without keeping kids away from harmful content. In Australia, where Discord’s policy first rolled out, some kids claimed that Discord never even tried to estimate their ages, while others found it easy to trick k-ID by using AI videos or altering their appearances to look older. A teen girl relied on fake eyelashes to do the trick, while one 13-year-old boy was estimated to be over 30 years old after scrunching his face to seem more wrinkled.

Badalich told The Verge that Discord doesn’t expect the tools to work perfectly but acts quickly to block workarounds, like teens using Death Stranding‘s photo mode to skirt age gates. However, questions remain about the accuracy of Discord’s age estimation model in assessing minors’ ages, in particular.

It may be noteworthy that Privately only claims that its technology is “proven to be accurate to within 1.3 years, for 18-20-year-old faces, regardless of a customer’s gender or ethnicity.” But experts told Ars last year that flawed age-verification technology still frequently struggles to distinguish minors from adults, especially when differentiating between a 17- and 18-year-old, for example.

Perhaps notably, Discord’s prior scandal occurred after hackers stole government IDs that users shared as part of the appeal process in order to fix an incorrect age estimation. Appeals could remain the most vulnerable part of this process, The Verge’s report indicated. Badalich confirmed that a third-party vendor would be reviewing appeals, with the only reassurance for users seemingly that IDs shared during appeals “are deleted quickly—in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.”

On Reddit, Discord fans awaiting big changes remain upset. A disgruntled Discord user suggested that “corporations like Facebook and Discord, will implement easily passable, cheapest possible, bare minimum under the law verification, to cover their ass from a lawsuit,” while forcing users to trust that their age-check data is secure.

Another user joked that she’d be more willing to trust that selfies never leave a user’s device if Discord were “willing to pay millions to every user” whose “scan does leave a device.”

This story was updated on February 9 to clarify that government IDs are checked off-device.