It’s impolite to guess a person’s age. And yet, Discord is going to do it by default. In a blog post, Discord announced that it will automatically assign users an estimated age group based on “multiple account signals” in an attempt to prevent children from accessing adult content.
According to the company, it has narrowed its age buckets to just two: adult (18 or older) and teen (13-17). The group that a user gets funneled into will determine what type of content they will be able to access, with the teens locked out of age-restricted spaces and unable to see adult content.
It’ll reportedly use “patterns of account behavior” to determine a user’s age, reasoning that “the way a typical 15-year-old uses Discord (including how many communities they’re a part of and how they interact with others) looks different in aggregate from how a typical 30-year-old uses Discord.” The age estimation option also means that most users won’t need to confirm their age manually via sensitive and personally identifiable information like scanning a driver’s license or providing a credit card.
Those methods of verification will now be reserved for edge cases (people who get grouped into the teen category when they are adults) and users located in Australia and the United Kingdom, who will be subject to the stepped-up age assurance methods due to local laws.
Discord’s decision to officially implement global age estimation comes after months of debate and pushback from its user base. The platform initially planned to introduce age verification checks in February but was forced to pump the brakes after users expressed concerns about the verification methods and the potential risk to their privacy. At the time, Discord had planned to require users to either submit to a face scan or provide a form of identification to verify their age.
Users had a good reason to question whether those verification methods would actually keep them safe rather than simply create a new vector of risk for them while Discord covered its own ass. In October of last year, the third-party verification platform that Discord used for age verification was hacked, resulting in 70,000 people potentially having their IDs exposed.
Discord’s decision to move forward with age estimation at least avoids the risk of storing vast numbers of user IDs, though most people probably won’t be thrilled by the idea of an algorithm analyzing their behavior to guess their age. The company’s decision to roll the system out globally also appears to be an attempt to get ahead of growing momentum around the world, where lawmakers are increasingly pushing to require age gates across parts of the internet.
