Do not give your ID to Discord

Normally, I’d save a story like this for my ongoing cyberpunk series, but two pieces of news have combined into something a lot more pressing than one of my angry old man book club articles.

First, Discord is precomplying with age verification requirements. Age verification is, on paper, a good thing, especially for teen safety. Places like Roblox and Discord have huge, ongoing problems with child exploitation, grooming, and abuse. Protecting vulnerable users is something that social media platforms should take more seriously. Obviously.

But the current methods of age verification aren’t the answer. In the UK, Discord rolled out age verification to comply with the Online Safety Act. In October of 2025, the company they used for their age-related appeals, 5CA, was breached, exposing as many as 70,000 government IDs (Discord insists that only the photos and not the identities themselves were exposed).

Now, Discord is rolling out age verification for everyone. Following the immediate pushback, Discord clarified that this won’t change most users’ experience. That’s because they’ll use all the other data they have about you to infer your age — things like age of your account, activity patterns, and “broader platform behavior” per the Electronic Freedom Foundation. To be clear here, Discord didn’t walk anything back or change their requirements. They just clarified.

How much data Discord already has about you aside, anyone it’s not confident in the age of will get defaulted to a teen. Again, this is, on paper, a good thing. Mostly, this prevents viewing sensitive or graphic images and videos. It also prevents teens (or “teens”) from joining age-gated spaces and speaking in voice servers. Messages from unknown users will get shunted to a separate inbox and come with a warning. (Full disclosure: I don’t understand what this separate inbox aims to accomplish.)

When Discord can’t figure out how old you are or guesses wrong, you’ll have to appeal the process by scanning a government ID or submitting a “video selfie.” Discord insists that this data is secure. They say the video selfie won’t leave your device and that your ID scan will be deleted by their third-party vendors immediately after verifying your age. I will be happy to be proven wrong, but that sounds like bullshit. And selfies of any kind are dangerous now.

The reason I call bullshit is because the two third-party companies they’re using — k-ID and Persona — are both funded in part by Peter Thiel-associated venture capital firms. Peter Thiel, the Epstein-linked democracy sceptic who founded the dystopian-level surveillance company Palantir.

And that brings us to the second set of headlines. From the New York Times, Google, Meta, Reddit, and Discord have been receiving — and at least occasionally complying with — administrative subpoenas from the Department of Homeland Security. The DHS has been asking “for identifying details of accounts that do not have a real person’s name attached and that have criticized ICE or pointed to the locations of ICE agents.”

Their defense is that they’re attempting to keep their agents safe in the field. You know, their agents who are kidnapping children, terrorizing communities, murdering people in the street, and imprisoning elderly dementia patients.

Administrative subpoenas are legal, but not judicial. Enforcing them requires the approval of a court. Supplying the sensitive information these subpoenas are requesting is its own form of precompliance, much like enacting global age verification.

Again, while Discord (and others) insist that your real name is not linked to your account or messages, this is, let’s say, dubious. And the sheer amount of data being collected on everyone all the time means that, while Discord might not store your ID, data brokers and the various surveillance databases have enough corroborating information to link everything about you together.

Protecting children and other at-risk groups is a good thing, and it’s important. But the current version of age-verification isn’t the way to do it. Black and Brown people, undocumented individuals, people with disabilities, and trans and nonbinary people are all disproportionately impacted by these requirements.

Preventing children from viewing adult content is a good goal, but the definition of adult content varies — and those definitions can be dangerous and damaging to the very group they’re aiming to “protect.” We live in a time when, in the US at least, media that even acknowledges the existence of non-straight people can be challenged and access to pregnancy-related health care is severely curtailed. Age-verification (as it is enacted right now) and the fact that these social media platforms are sharing information with law enforcement will have a chilling effect on both free speech and on access to life-saving information. 

Right now, there’s not a lot to do about Discord’s age-verification system (and obviously, you shouldn't use Death Stranding 2 or Garry's Mod to get around age verification). Living with these rules is a trade-off of privacy versus access. Here’s the EFF guide on your options.

But we can make noise about it. I can write articles like this and you can complain about it wherever you feel safe to do so. We can call our representatives. And, most of all, we can keep helping and caring for each other. Because the companies and the people in charge of them are not looking out for us.