Social media company Discord are trying their best to reassure people irked by the recently announced global rollout of some new age verification measures, which include face scans and a background “age inference” system for determining whether the user is an adult.
Amid predictable backlash against potential privacy violations – see, for context, last year’s cybersecurity breach that saw a hacker get hold of personal information used for age verification via one of Discord’s customer service partners – Discord are promising that they won’t require every user to complete a face scan or upload some ID, and that the “vast majority of people can continue using Discord exactly as they do today”. Albeit, mostly because “the majority of Discord users don’t access age restricted content”.
“For the majority of adult users, we will be able to confirm your age group using information we already have,” the platform holders write in a clarification on their official blog. “We use age prediction to determine, with high confidence, when a user is an adult. This allows many adults to access age-appropriate features without completing an explicit age check.”
If Discord feels the need to verify your age, they’re offering additional privacy protections. Firstly, any face scans you take won’t leave your device. “If you choose Facial Age Estimation, you’ll be prompted to record a short video selfie of your face,” the post notes. “The Facial Age Estimation technology runs entirely on your device in real time when you are performing the verification. That means that facial scans never leave your device, and Discord and vendors never receive it. We only get your age group.”
Discord say they will only use info from this and other ID verification processes “for safety purposes and to help us deliver age appropriate experiences”. They assure that they won’t use it to help target adverts, or sell your data to third parties. Speaking of third parties, they also promise they aren’t working with the same partners responsible for last autumn’s cybersecurity incident. “We are partnering with dedicated age assurance vendors who specialize in performing these verifications in a privacy-forward way,” the post goes on. “These vendors were not involved in the September 2025 data breach of our customer service agent.
“Our vendors perform these verifications in a way to minimize the data collected and stored,” it continues. “For FAE, the video selfie is processed on device and never stored. IDs are processed to get your age only and then deleted. Your identity is never associated with your Discord account.”
Discord have also shared a little about how their “age inference” model works. It’s a machine learning tool, as you may guess, which predicts “whether a user falls into a particular age group based on patterns of user behavior and several other signals associated with their account on Discord”.
The company will only use these hints to assign you to an age group “when our confidence level is high”; otherwise, they’ll ask you to confirm your age. They also say the model doesn’t base its predictions on the content of your messages, which I guess is some reassurance that “age inference” isn’t some kind of LLM chatbot ‘training’ process in disguise.
Discord’s new age verification model is already live in the UK and Australia, and will kick in worldwide over March. If you’re not persuaded by the above, there’s always internet relay chat.
