Any age verification process that does not consider the age of the account as a verification option is a data trap, plain and simple.
Any age verification process that does not consider the age of the account as a verification option is a data trap, plain and simple.
They are planning on doing something similar:
Discord is also rolling out an age inference model that analyzes metadata like the types of games a user plays, their activity on Discord, and behavioral signals like signs of working hours or the amount of time they spend on Discord.
“If we have a high confidence that they are an adult, they will not have to go through the other age verification flows,”
I'm curious to know what this "model" actually means. A real-time AI monitoring for conversations?
How does anyone know whether a family is engaging in that time-honored tradition of passing down accounts from grandfather, to father, to son, to child, and their posterity, in perpetuity?
Seriously though, unless you have positively identified the person who created the account in the first place, you have 0% chance of knowing whether it is the same person using it today.
Gamers sell their high-level accounts all the time. It would be a simple matter of economics that the Discord users with the oldest accounts sell them to 12-year-olds. Likewise, accounts are shared willy-nilly, whether or not that violates the rules. And accounts can be stolen or compromised, if you're really hard up.
How often do you suppose they will be re-checking your ID? Once every... never?
They need to have an always-on camera looking at the person using the device. No camera, no discord.
No law or regulation is ever 100% effective in real life. Income tax is not collected 100% effectively. Should we not do it? Criminals are not caught 100% of the time, should we not do it?
Of course this won't be 100% effective, maybe 80-90% effective. That's all they need and expect from this system.
Exactly.
HN is constantly obsessed with is it perfectly effective?
No law, none, is perfectly effective. Speed limits certainly aren’t self enforcing, but remove your neighborhood’s speed limits first if you truly believe laws must be demonstrated perfect.
So then it's REASONABLY not the corporation's fault if that user sees explicit content.
But under that argument, you would have to prove your age on a regular basis, the plan right now appears to be that each account would only need to do so once.
Just remember that the Terms of Service you agreed to are about as firm as explosive diarrhea.
You agree not to license, sell, lend, or transfer your account, Discord username, vanity URL, or other unique identifier without our prior written approval. We also reserve the right to delete, change, or reclaim your username, URL, or other identifier.
If transfer of accounts is a policy violation, then Discord has legal cover to confidently assert that, once ID is verified, the ID'd person is the owner and controller of the account thereafter.
Account selling, stealing, and sharing will certainly still happen, but that's grounds for banning, and not Discord's legal liability anymore.
Then why could they not also legally get away with using account age as a proxy?
Just ban that in TOS. As we know TOS is inviolable. As such it is not possible to sell, gift or otherwise transfer an account. At least this should be considered how it works for age verification. If account transfer is found out account can be terminated thus closing the loop hole.
Has discord even been around for 18 years?
Yeah, my youtube/google account is almost as old as youtube itself is, but will constantly ask me to verify my age when clicking on something as marked 'not for kids'. Can we just get the leisure-suit-larry age-verification system ;)
Apple deleted many legacy mac-dot-com accounts without qualms, not long ago. It was the phone accounts, in so many ways, driving it .. IMHO