Politicians: That’s the point.
Joking aside, now that I think about it, what difference does does it make if companies are stealing infos and spying on you with government mandated age verification checks, and hackers stealing your government mandated age verification info? This just reinforces my view that governments (and companies) are nothing but glorified gangsters.
A hacker stealing your id can do way more malicious stuff like more expertly crafted phishing and identity fraud just to name two.
No one involved in this from the government to the companies is innocent in this chain though in my opinion. A breach is always bound to happen.
Option 3: companies that you pay to provide authentication service. Regulated so that they clearly tell you if they are subsidizing service outside of your payments.
We nearly already do this with certificate services and they would probably be in a good position to offer an id service.
the only person who’s allowed to verify my age is my cat because he won’t stop being a dick about it
I’d like to use your cat verification system too.
so instead of creating some kind of authorization system that would not require sending your private information to everyone the govt did nothing and instead put that responsibility on EVERY company. begs the question why rushing so much?
The department of Social security could have created some sort of public/private key pair to very age and DOB. But that’s too much to ask for isn’t it?
this is why i dont give my ID to any service(obv including Discord) anymore.
The issue here is that age verification is mandatory in the UK, and not just for Discord.
yeah thats bad.
Including mine. Nice job Discord! Thanks for the fake age ban…this was their plan, wasn’t it?
Proofs the UK is a shithole as well funnily enough.
Nothing against the Brits but their government oh damn that’s bad.
The Labour under Starmer is closet Tory. I wish that the popular Manchester Labour mayor (whose name I forgot) takes his place as PM, which actual leftist politicians try to make him to be. Although this will be a Sysiphean task under the ruthless politicking in British politics and Labour Party’s own strict rule on who could become PM.
Andy Burnham!
Wait til you see the next one.
:(
Yep. This is just the first. As long as individuals submit to these ID verifications, services which provide them will be highly targeted. I find it ridiculous that 1.5 million people actually submitted their info to access discord instead of finding a workaround or alternative. I can only imagine how many are gullible enough to verify on porn sites.
We’ll be reminiscing about good old boring Starmer once Lord Gobshite inevitably gets voted in by a load of gammons
More than half of them turn out to be AI
They’re all screenshots from Detroit: Become Human
And this is why this provide xyz private information for verification bs should be illegal
And why any service asking it should be moved on from.
Pretty sure these people could have found a teamspeak, matrix, or mumble server without the requirement.
100%. Honestly for me it’s to the point that it’s hard to feel bad; people have been shouting from the rooftops that this will happen, this is how it will happen, and this is exactly the outcome of it happening. Like sure, 99% of discord users are computer illiterate gamers, but come on, you can’t say you weren’t warned.
In this case, it’s the opposite for people in the UK. It’s illegal to not verify age.
I’ve criticized the sort of personal information that is allowed to be managed by banking entities in the cases of Accidental Americans, where people who have nothing to do with America except that they were born in the US have their data handled by private entities to be passed onto governments they’ve never been in. Public entities that should handle and be responsible for it in their actual home countries want to wash their hands off from them and there’s too much money against too small of a minority for anyone to care about their rights. It doesn’t matter how banks have consistently proven that they or their staff can act criminally, either.
At least here, it affects a lot more people so it will likely bring in the change and reform it needs, even if the sensitivity of this data is significantly less.
Gonna have to say, this guy is definitely gonna be screwed by this:
hey don’t share my discord id photo please
Keep on keeping on 👍
Thank god I never gave them an image.
Hmm, I don’t recall ever doing age verification for Discord. Were older accounts grandfather’d in, or is it currently limited by region or something?
Any time your account gets locked for age reason it requires it. So if you have never had an age lock it’s unlikely you had to do it.
It’s as easy as someone reporting you for being underage with no proof or even just saying “I’m 14 and what is this” as a meme to get locked tho.
Hell the auto flag system can hit you if you just talk like a kid sometimes.
I think it’s a UK thing
They have been passing legislation to basically dox their citizens for them to gain access to the internet
The Russia thanks UK for this valuable information
Yeah it’s like the government want to get sued. They are better than the previous administration but that’s a pretty low bar
It was obvious things like this will happen, unlike banks and government sites social media sites don’t have strict cyber security requirements and they want these sites to have a government ID. It was a bad idea from the start.
Also currently being rolled out in Australia too 😔
You often get age verification if your account got blocked because someone reported you to be underage
I believe people from
EUUK and people who say they were under 13 and got reported. They needed to send in a pic of them holding their ID to get unbanned.edit: UK people not EU
as some pointed out, eu folks didnt have to verify anything. afaik, its the uk folks that are affected
damn. I’m a 2 month old infant. Will i need to send in my ID??
You’re much too young for the Internet. Please submit your SSN and parents’ credit card information.
From EU, got nothing
Well, did you get reported and did you ever say you were under 13?
I don’t know and I don’t remember. I was replying to the ‘people from the EU’ bit, as it does not seem correct to me.
The fact that these photos and PII (personally identifiable information) were not destroyed after the verification process was certified is absolutely atrocious OpSec. I don’t even care which of the two companies is ultimately responsible, because they are both responsible.
- Zendesk for their bad OpSec
- Discord for both outsourcing this AND not having contractual requirements to properly secure and destroy PII when it was no longer required.
I work in IT, and treat PII like it’s dangerously radioactive, because in the digital world, it really is.
That’s because you have ethics
I agree completely its moronic, but I do imagine the law requires it
“Apparently” only those who were challenging the verification results and uploaded awaiting reverification are affected.
Not that that isn’t bad enough
That’s even worse, in my eyes. Maybe not in scale, but when appeal process is more vulnerable, that seems very questionable.
Me when I get a request for PII pertaining to a suspected corruption case: Have one of our corporate lawyers give me a written and explicit statement of what data I’m supposed to send to whom or get bent. I’m not touching that with a ten foot pole and gloves unless I have a legally solid affirmation that what I’m doing won’t come back to bite me, and that our workers’ council knows about it and will back me up.
I’m reluctant to even confirm that I can get that information in the first place. I mean, I’m the one with full access to the audit tool, so I probably do, but I’d have to access that data in the first place to check. I don’t think that anyone would notice or care so long as I don’t share that information, but as you said: dangerously radioactive; don’t touch if I can help it.
Right. It blows me away the required training we have to do for physical files more secured than Fort Knox! Tech world? Eh just throw it in the recycle bin
Anyone still defending age verification online is an idiot.
Too be fair, they were before this incident too.
I don‘t think I‘ve ever seen someone defend it online but there were a few people laughing it off which is not much better.
So, I looked at age verification - it was made clear photos were on device only and never transmitted.
If this turns out to be false, then the legal fallout would be apocalyptic.
(Edit: or not, see the comment by ambitiousprocess below)
These were photos submitted via the compromised support provider (Zendesk) via the Discord support portal.
Automated age verification via their partner (k-ID, which has its own issues) is a separate system, which was only available to some users. Other users had to contact Discord support manually and submit photo ID, which went through Zendesk, which was then compromised in this breach.
Additionally, for the automated process, it’s the video selfie that’s on-device and never transmitted, but photos of your ID and selfie photo are transmitted, just supposedly deleted afterwards. Those ones are *not included in this breach, as far as we’re aware, as it’s an entirely different third-party with wholly separate infrastructure.
Which is why you farm off stuff like this to third parties whenever possible
DiscordCorp will get a slap on the wrist and give people an offer of a free six months of discord turbo (so long as you provide payment info so it can auto-renew on month seven).
But ANY meaningful consequences will go toward Zendesk Corp for not doing what they were supposed to. And… then everyone will just use ZZendesk instead
Well, yeah. Discord isn’t exactly at fault here, they’re operating as best they can within the boundaries of a piece of legislation that could be best described as gods gift to the “I-told-you-so” crowd. This breach is exactly what everyone was warning would happen with the UK ID laws, and discord got stung first as they’re one of the few companies trying to adhere to the law in good faith (which, yes, why in hell they’re trying to do this is good faith is a very good question)
Literally days ago i was accessing a nsfw channel and i got “well, you should send to us your ID and things so i can verificate you” and i thought “no way! I don’t want to give my infos, if they have a data breach we are all doomed” and i ignore, well i don’t want to say “i told you so” but…
Neat summary and cleanup - editing original post to point at this.
What legal fallout? Discord made users agree to new terms just a week ago that involves forced arbitration.
Sounds like Discord is about to have 2 million cases of arbitration to sort out.
One person takes them to arbitration, it’s short work for their legal team, if 1000 do it’s harder, if 100,000 do, you still have to respond in a timely manner. The costs would be astronomical.
Valve and a few others removed it for that reason, it’s a bomb waiting to blow.
Forced arbitration clauses are not legal in many European jurisdictions, so “agreeing” to them didn’t actually do anything.
Are they legal in any EU jurisdictions? I’d hope not.
Not to mention half of their TOS being illegal/unenforceable in the first place.
Dunno, just didn’t want to make a statement I’m not sure of.
Forced arbitration tends to backfire massively when you have something of this scale because of everyone starts doing it. The cost of that forced arbitration is more than what the lawsuits would have been without it. It’s a big reason why like steam got rid of it. If you get too many people trying to go after you, it’s just not worth it and costs too much.
And US courts allow companies to reverse force abortion if it no longer suits the company!
I’m not sure if Discord’s ToS apply to zendesk
you agree to legal mediation other than a court in their terms of service, so… not really
Those don’t always hold up, especially when the shit is really hitting the fan.
Here’s the information directly from the FAQ as of right now:
Q: Is my data stored when I use Face Scan or Scan ID verification?
A: Discord and k-ID do not permanently store personal identity documents or your video selfies. The image of your identity document and the ID face match selfie are deleted directly after your age group is confirmed, and the video selfie used for facial age estimation never leaves your device.
That sounds like the video stays on your device but the photos do not.
Big company lies again what a big surprise
Yeah, but those methods of verification weren’t the subject of this breach, this was some manual bullshit done through Zendesk.
Where is that small print? It should be archived before Discord tries to change it.
Check down on data security ;)
Looks like it’s already been archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20250930051220/https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/30326565624343-How-to-Complete-Age-Verification-on-Discord
It’s also here:
Idk it doesn’t seem like there are any legal consequences for tech companies anymore.
Definitely not, laws are only for the poors.
Fuck Discord
I agree, but fuck this dumb law first and foremost.
discord isn’t at fault here. I don’t say they do good stuff either, i just want to stick to the facts. It’s the UK government who forced them in the first place
They enforced the verification, but discord was supposed to delete the images right after.
Are you really defending somebody else’s income generating business?
Discord is a threat actor
nvm i wanted to say the complete opposite, my brain wanted to say two sentences at the same time and mixed up the words. corrected it now
