Discord puts age verification plans on hold

Online chat service Discord has delayed plans to start verifying the age of its users until later in the year.

Discord has delayed plans to begin verifying the age of its users.

The online chat service announced earlier this month that it would soon require users to verify their age with either a face scan or a form of ID but has now put the changes on hold until later this year after a backlash.

Discord explained that it would meet any specific legal obligations it has for user age verification and stressed that age verification will be part of the platform in the future.

However, Discord is now developing “more verification options” for users that won’t need facial or ID scans, with one such method being credit card verification.

Stanislav Vishnevskiy, Discord’s co-founder and chief technology officer, wrote in a blog post: “We knew this rollout was going to be controversial.

“In hindsight, we should have provided more detail about our intentions and how the process works.”

Vishnevskiy feels that a broader mistrust in tech companies and online surveillance has increased concern about why Discord is doing age verification at all, and what it plans to do with the information going forward.

Vishnevskiy wrote: “I get that scepticism. It’s earned, not just toward us, but toward the entire tech industry.”

He explained that less than 10 per cent of users are expected to need to verify their age when the company rolls out the process later this year.

Those users will be unable to access “age-restricted content” and some default settings will be put in place until their age has been verified.

Part of the reason why so few users will need to verify their age is because Discord already uses an internal “age determination” system that analyses “how long your account has existed, whether you have a payment method on file, what types of servers you’re in, and general patterns of account activity.”

Vishnevskiy has emphasised that the platform’s system “does not read your messages, analyse your conversations, or look at the content you post” in order to figure out your age.