Technology @lemmy.zip shish_mish @lemmy.world 3d ago

Discord Begins Testing Facial Scans for Age Verification

gizmodo.com Discord Begins Testing Facial Scans for Age Verification

Some countries have passed strict new laws dictating youth access to digital platforms.

22 comments

If they ask me to do that I'm gone
- Bye!
  
  Seriously though the reason Discord can do stuff like this is because they have a captive audience. People are unwilling to jump ship so here we are.
Sounds like an excuse to move my community elsewhere!
- Did you?
I hopped back into VRChat yesterday and i found out it has introduced age verification with ID. If people start requiring that for every fun room i'm cooked.
- There’s Resonite. And Matrix.
  
  Seems cool. I'm also following the development of V-Sekai(since it uses Godot which i personally like).
I'm trying to figure out how they'd even use this for age verification, seeing the wild swing of ages versus appearance that I alone have experienced.

Sounds sus as fk. Will be opting out of this one and if they push it, there's a few nice competitors licking their chops in the wings.
God, I don't wanna look like a crazy tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist to my friends, but I hope one day they magically get concerned or ask me for privacy respecting alternative services. I haven't really had the chance to actually test how good Revolt, Matrix, and SimpleX are, but all of them would be worth trying a million times more than Discord.

I wish we would use Signal instead. But unfortunately I have to resign myself to using Discord and GroupMe for school and friends. At least they don't hate me for not using Insta, although some randos do seem to be annoyed by my reluctance to use it on first meet.

It's just so hard trying not to isolate myself from friends. I get that the alternatives aren't always great (might lack video calls, easy bot management, sever costs, shitty UX and onboarding, etc.) but we gotta at least give them a try...
Time to look into matrix.org
There are a few qualifiers here. It's for some users in UK and Australia trying to access sensitive content. And it sounds like it's reaction to laws against youth under 16 accessing social media. In Australia, anyway. So the scope is currently fairly limited.

Should we be worried that this will pave the road for larger privacy abuses? Yes, of course we should. That scenario feels likely, in my opinion.

Is this enough to convince my friends to use a different platform? Not yet.
- Disable camera access to the app/binary
  
  They could just deny access without verification. But thinking more broadly there'll certainly be ways to fool the system. But, shouldn't have to in the first place.
Discord can scan deez nuts
facial recognition scans require a realtime video feed of you turning your head each way.. a fake photo is not going to suffice
- I'll just leave this here
  
  https://github.com/hacksider/Deep-Live-Cam
- So, some modeling clay and an airbrush then?
This is where Authoritarianism begins.

22 comments