Discord admits it made a mistake, postpones age verification
The storm of criticism against Discord’s decision to require “age verification” appears to have the company sweating, enough to change course, at least temporarily.
For starters, Discord recently announced that it was cutting ties and distancing itself from Persona, the controversial age-verification partner service that has drawn widespread criticism from users due to its privacy policies and handling of facial and ID data. Discord is currently evaluating several other providers and is emphasizing privacy as a top priority.
Discord’s original plan was to start age verification as early as March, but in light of the controversy, the company is now delaying the age verification rollout until the second half of 2026, according to a blog post that tells users how they misunderstood the fact that age verification is actually a good thing despite all the privacy concerns.
In this blog post, Discord co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy writes that “more than 90% of users will never need to verify their age to continue using Discord exactly as they do today.” Later, it also explains: “If you are among the fewer than 10% of users who need to verify, we will offer you options designed to tell us only your age and never your identity. »
Discord really wants you to believe that the company won’t collect your personal information: “We don’t want to know who you are. We just need to know if you’re an adult. And it works both ways: a provider also has no way of associating your identity with your Discord account. That’s intentional.” (A provider is a third-party intermediary that manages the age verification process between you and Discord.)
While delaying the rollout of age verification, Discord will work to add more verification options, better vendor transparency, as well as transparency reporting that includes “how many users were invited to verify, what methods they used, and how often our automated systems processed it without any user action.”
“We made mistakes,” the blog post concludes. “We’re listening. We’ll get there.” Only time will tell how true this is.
