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from the I've-got-a-Bad-Thieling-About-This dept.
Ten days ago, the social chat app Discord announced that it would launch “teen-by-default” settings for its global audience. As part of this update, all new and existing users worldwide will have a teen-appropriate experience, with updated communication settings, restricted access to age-gated spaces, and content filtering that preserves privacy and meaningful connections, the platform said.
This, of course, means that to use Discord the way you are used to, you’ll have to let it scan your face, and the internet wasn’t happy. Many communities quickly announced their move to other platforms. Others, like the security researcher Celeste, who goes by the handle vmfunc, were convinced there would be a workaround.
Together with two other researchers, they set out to look into Persona, the San Francisco-based startup that’s used by Discord for biometric identity verification – and found a Persona frontend exposed to the open internet on a US government authorized server.
More at The Rage
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 22 2026, @01:33AM
C'mon. We weren't born yesterday. We know how this goes. The official policy sounds sorta reasonable, but the in-practice enforcement is anything but. The stuff actually harmful to children like grooming will somehow manage to evade the rules. ID checks will get imposed on random users with no apparent interaction with adult content (or simply by policy changed to be required for everyone in the future). Censored content will extend to cover more and more things that are perfectly teen-appropriate but disliked by people in power like protests and queer content and Adafruit because their overzealous censors linked "fruit" => "fruity" => "gay" (okay, probably not that specific case, but there will be moderation decisions that stupid).