Discord is rolling out facial scanning and ID checks in March for everybody who would not wish to be locked right into a ‘teen-appropriate expertise’

“Eugh,” we mentioned, again in 2025 when Discord started “an experiment” during which some customers had been requested to scan their faces or IDs to be able to confirm that they had been sufficiently old to entry delicate content material. However experiments, typically talking, are assessments, and assessments, typically talking, are one thing you do in pursuit of a specific objective, and now right here we’re not fairly a yr later and Discord is making ready to roll out face scanning and ID checks for everybody, all over the place, on a regular basis.

You may nonetheless be capable of use Discord for those who choose to not take part on this specific surveillance nightmare, however starting in early March you may be locked right into a “teen-appropriate expertise” for those who do not. Meaning content material filters, age gates, the lack to talk in “stage channels”—primarily channels that allow a bunch of individuals to converse whereas an viewers listens—and restrictions on direct message and buddy requests.

“Nowhere is our security work extra vital than on the subject of teen customers, which is why we’re saying these updates in time for Safer Web Day,” Discord head of product coverage Savannah Badalich mentioned. “Rolling out teen-by-default settings globally builds on Discord’s present security structure, giving teenagers robust protections whereas permitting verified adults flexibility.”

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Discord says its facial-scanning system will ship “privacy-forward age assurance”: Your facial scan will not be used to determine you as a person, however will as an alternative use it (along with the facility of AI, I assume) to find out whether or not or not you are truly an grownup. When you want, or if maybe you could attraction an incorrect age guess, you may add a authorities ID as an alternative.

“Video selfies for facial age estimation by no means depart a consumer’s system,” in the present day’s announcement says, including,”Id paperwork submitted to our vendor companions are deleted shortly—most often, instantly after age affirmation.”

You could recollect it was a type of vendor companions who leaked an estimated 70,000 age verification photographs in October 2025—simply 4 months in the past—together with names, usernames, emails, the final 4 digits of bank cards, and IP addresses: “A fairly complete mess,” as PC Gamer’s Jeremy Laird put it on the time.

In order that’s fairly terrible, and there isn’t any motive to imagine it will not occur once more. The even larger difficulty, although, is the rising embrace of the digital panopticon. The UK’s On-line Security Invoice is “a large risk to on-line privateness, safety, and speech,” the Digital Frontier Basis mentioned in 2023 forward of its passage because the On-line Security Act: “As a substitute of safety, we may have backdoors in end-to-end encryption. And as an alternative of free speech, we may have scanning and filtering of all content material, on a regular basis.”

Regardless of important public pushback, different international locations and areas are following swimsuit with their very own regime of age checks and definitions of “delicate” content material, which in some circumstances has led to bans and blocks: Australians below 16 are banned from social media, as an illustration—though not from Steam, illustrating the basically arbitrary nature of the entire thing. Within the US, the Children On-line Security Act will lead platforms to over-censor, the EFF warned in 2025, as a result of “the checklist of harms in KOSA’s ‘responsibility of care’ provision is so broad and obscure that no platform will know what to do relating to any given piece of content material.”

What these new legal guidelines are prone to do is drive individuals to search out methods round them, as we famously noticed when individuals discovered that Demise Stranding’s photograph mode might be used to bypass Discord’s “strong” age verification system in 2025, or just to search out different, much less regulated methods to work together on-line: A 2025 report discovered that the UK’s age verification requirement was driving down site visitors to websites that complied, whereas those that didn’t had been having fun with an uptick. Badalich informed The Verge that Discord expects “some type of hit” to its site visitors on account of the brand new face scanning system, however mentioned, “We’ll discover different methods to carry customers again.”