Reddit and Discord in trouble over controversial age verification

Both Reddit and Discord have got themselves into trouble over the use of a controversial third-party age verification service.

Reddit has been fined £14.5 ($19.5M) million for the unlawful use of children’s personal information, while Discord has experienced a user backlash …

The UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) requires online platforms to verify the age of its users and ensure that children are not exposed to harmful content.

Reddit’s checks inadequate

BBC News reports that an investigation by the UK’s privacy watchdog found that Reddit failed to adequately carry out these checks.

Reddit has been fined £14.47m by the UK’s data watchdog for unlawfully using children’s personal information. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said the platform failed to properly check the age of its users, putting children using Reddit at risk of being exposed to inappropriate and harmful content online.

The company used an outside firm called Persona which checks either an uploaded selfie or a photo of government ID. Reddit said it did so because it didn’t want to have first-hand knowledge of its users’ identities.

However, the ICO said that these checks were inadequate, with many children being declared adults, and that the company was therefore illegally processing data from children.

Discord experienced user backlash

Discord used the same company but quickly faced anger from users who pointed out that Persona appears to access government records. The Verge reports:

Users across social media accused Discord of “lying” about how it plans on handling face scans and ID uploads. Much of the criticism was directed toward Discord’s partnership with Persona, an age verification provider also used by Reddit and Roblox […] Users pointed to Persona’s privacy policy, which states that it may obtain personal data from users through “third party databases, government records, and other publicly available sources.”

The platform says that it no longer uses Persona.

Discord’s head of product policy, Savannah Badalich, confirms the company “ran a limited test of Persona in the UK where age assurance had previously launched and that test has since concluded.”

Growing calls to make Apple and Google responsible

There have been growing calls for the app stores of Apple and Google to be made legally responsible for age verification and then to apply age gating to app downloads in response.

This is already the case in some US states.

9to5Mac’s Take

While I fully understand Apple not wanting to take on this responsibility, I’ve said it before and I say it again:

Forcing users to hand over government photo ID and video selfies to an endless array of developers is a privacy nightmare. I’d far rather trust Apple to verify identity and age once, and then simply block downloads of age-inappropriate apps.

It would also be a way better user experience if each of us only had to verify our age one time, rather than every single time we downloaded a new age-gated app.

Photo by Ralph Olazo on Unsplash