The social platform is testing age checks using facial scanning for access to sensitive content.
  • rivan@lemm.eeEnglish
    471·
    1 day ago

    Sounds like a creepy way for discord to take millions of photos of children and feed them to an AI.

    • GreenKnight23@lemmy.worldEnglish
      116·
      1 day ago

      my time with discord was short. but the amount of pedophiles or people who supported pedophiles was so high I never went back.

      my point is, this is on-brand for them.

        • GreenKnight23@lemmy.worldEnglish
          42·
          19 hours ago

          topics on gaming, fintech, AI/ML. All of the ones I had gone to had at least one channel/room where somebody was freely promoting or defending csa.

          that was about 4 years ago.

          • S_H_K@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            5·
            19 hours ago

            Holy fuck I don’t do much discord never had tbat problem. That’s wild but I’m kinda not surprised.

  • Korhaka@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    342·
    1 day ago

    How? My PC doesn’t have a camera. Also couldn’t you just hold up a video of an older person

    • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      22·
      11 hours ago

      Pretty much any adult has a smartphone capable of running discord and with a camera. You only have to verify once on any device.

      Also couldn’t you just hold up a video of an older person

      Based on my experience with similar things in the past, it activates the camera for a few seconds and you have to pan to give it a 3d image of your face.

      Edit: Not sure why I’m getting downvoted for explaining how the system works. I’m not even taking any sides here.

  • kitnaht@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1833·
    2 days ago

    It says information used for age checks will not be stored by Discord or the verification company.

    Bullshit. Every time some bitch-ass company says this, 4-5 years later they’re like “we were hacked, someone took everyone’s photo IDs!”

    • Ulrich@feddit.orgEnglish
      60·
      2 days ago

      “And we were hacked because we don’t care about security because there’s zero accountability, see you at the next hack!”

    • j0ester@lemmy.worldEnglish
      111·
      2 days ago

      It won’t… it really won’t. It will be on Donald’s DOGE server, run by Space X.

  • Rooki@lemmy.worldEnglish
    321·
    1 day ago

    I mean… there ARE privacy respecting options, but guess what they chose to do so.

    Like, to protect the children UNPROTECT the children by uploading the face to a thirdparty company, so not even directly to discord. I didnt read their TOS or Privacy Policy, but i bet they save the images for “improving” their model and selling it to other AI / ML companies.

  • Toes♀@ani.socialEnglish
    31·
    1 day ago

    I will uninstall and refuse to use any tool that requires this on the penalty of death.

  • keyboardpithecus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    94·
    2 days ago

    I find absurd that many political groups including the Pirate Party moved to Discord. People who that claim to be fighting for the rights of user privacy then invite you to join Discord. Looks like they have been assimilated by big tech.

    • Bora M. Alper@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      181·
      1 day ago

      In all fairness, I think the FOSS community lacks good messaging tools so people end up using:

      • for personal messaging: WhatsApp (very popular in Europe), iMessage (in the US), Telegram (Brazil and Asia)
      • for communities: Discord and Telegram
      • for businesses: Slack (popular in tech) and Teams (~all the rest)

      Signal has been gaining momentum for personal messaging but its unrelenting focus on privacy comes with some significant usability tradeoffs: (1) it doesn’t have a web-app that I can use from other computers that I don’t control (eg a work laptop), (2) it doesn’t sync well between my phone (primary) and desktop apps (secondary), (3) it doesn’t have a “bots” API like Telegram does so its creative uses are very limited, (4) third-party clients are officially disallowed.

      Matrix might be a good fit for communities and businesses (which have very distinct moderation needs as in a business you can just report users to HR hehe), but in my experience it (or its flagship client Element) has lots of performance issues that makes it unpleasant to use. It also reminds me of XMPP with its different extensions and not knowing which clients supported which extensions; for example, go to https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/ and click around to discover that many clients don’t support threads yet. All that being said, I think Matrix is still the one that’s best positioned to win the communities.

      For businesses, I think the “open core” model is pretty competitive: you have Rocket Chat, Mattermost, and Zulip. In fairness I think they made significant strides so I’d consider them pretty successful in their own regard, despite Teams dominating the market by abusing Microsoft’s monopoly and Slack’s popularity + coupling with Salesforce. Now, the issue is that those three “open core” software aren’t very useful for communities because again, their moderation models are very different. Moderation is a ~non-issue in a business setting where you have HR and other functions to enforce the rules and penalise accordingly.

      Long story short, what’s your FOSS alternative to Discord for communities? Revolt maybe?

          • jsomae@lemmy.mlEnglish
            2·
            21 hours ago

            Oh, I suppose. My experience with mumble is 12 years out of date, but I recall that you generally plan to use Mumble in advance rather than contact somebody through mumble.

            • Gina@lemmy.wtfEnglish
              22·
              19 hours ago

              Noob. Gotta have somebody host the mumble server 24/7. Persistent private chat with images amongst your buddies.

              And absolutely destroyed by discords reaction gifs and emojis.

              • jsomae@lemmy.mlEnglish
                1·
                16 hours ago

                I hardly use nor see reaction gifs on discord, though the emoji UI/UX is a big deal. (I think the gif system they use has an open API though, so it could be added to other platforms…)

      • PassingThrough@lemm.eeEnglish
        9·
        2 days ago

        Same thing that’s wrong with Teamspeak and the other old standby, IRC:

        A dated look and lack of shinies like inline GIFs scares the youngsters, the lack of history/persistence drops them and everyone else.

        Ah, the many logging bots of IRC. Going to a website or getting daily sized text files DCC’d to you so you could search up if your problem had already been solved, or so someone said they think it was solved on one of those days…

        • jsomae@lemmy.mlEnglish
          55·
          2 days ago

          history/persistance is the problem; I don’t think anyone seriously cares about inline GIFs.

            • Kami@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              9·
              1 day ago

              I don’t see anything wrong in preferring a higher level of expression through GIFs or whatever.

          • Gina@lemmy.wtfEnglish
            2·
            1 day ago

            Well fuck me if history/persistence isn’t really a problem in an age when we were being warned the government was spying on everything.

  • deur@feddit.nlEnglish
    494·
    2 days ago

    A seatbelt does not stop you from breaking a law. Age verification does. The assumption is that you are lying and trying to break the law and you need to prove why you aren’t. This has nothing to do with discord. Be mad at shit garbage UK and Australian regulators.

  • Optional@lemmy.worldEnglish
    40·
    2 days ago

    See I still remember when I didn’t have to scan my face to get a machine to do something. And that’s the way it will always be. For me.

  • OverTheFiniteSun@lemmy.caEnglish
    15·
    2 days ago

    Well. Anyone got a Discord alternative recommendation if I use it for text messaging? Would rather not upload my ID or face. I looked at Revolt, but they’re apparently histed in the UK, which is mandating age verification.

  • 𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆@lemmy.worldEnglish
    122·
    2 days ago

    Actually look at the way Discord works in your network, like all the raw IP addresses and and connections with no clear ownership or human readable name, with dozens of changing connections to get any of it to work. Then go try to ask questions about what is going on and who you’re connecting to. Discover that none of it is documented or described anywhere. Then realize that this means no one running Discord is doing so on a fully audited and logged host. You simply cannot be without a bunch of effort. I made it to the 6th layer of whitelisted raw IP addresses, and still nothing worked while trying to connect to Discord in a fully logged and documented network. I am simply unwilling to write a script to annotate that many connections so that all of my logs make sense. I seriously doubt anyone on Discord is doing so, and they certainly lack any understanding of what they are connecting to, why, or the protocols. So the Discord user is telling me “my opsec and privacy awareness is as nonexistent as a pig in a herd running off a cliff, and my system should be assumed compromised with no idea of what might be connected.” Everyone else doing it is a garbage excuse. That no one appears to have gotten hurt – has tissue thin merit, but also reveals that the user runs blind in herds while hoping for the best. Such information infers a lot about a person, their depth, accountability, and ethics – in certain scopes.

  • Fallstar@mander.xyzEnglish
    101·
    2 days ago

    Guess I better get my picture of Elon ready /s

    Or who is the CEO of Discord?

  • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zipEnglish
    108·
    2 days ago

    Use Mastodon. You can use a server outside of your country. And even if your country attempts to find the operator, 10% of their global turnover of zero is still zero.