Age verification is rolling out all over the place, bringing a degree of misunderstanding everywhere it goes. Games messaging service Discord is the latest to be impacted. So what happened? Tim Green, director of MEF’s APIs and Authentication programme, reports.
I recently watched a film called The Remarkable Life of Ibelin. It’s about a wheelchair-bound Norwegian youngster who spends many hours role-playing on World of Warcraft. After he dies, his parents are shocked to receive huge numbers of messages from other players describing how Ibelin changed their lives with his empathy and advice.
I thought about this film when I read about the latest age-verification controversy – this one involving Discord.
If you don’t know, Discord is a messaging platform based around gaming. It lets players exchange chat, make calls and swap media inside virtual communities called servers. It’s vast. It has about 150 million monthly active users.
Digital wallets should help. Users will be able to share an encrypted token saying: ‘I am over 18’. This token will be entirely trustworthy and obviate the need for any other personal info. This is called ‘selective disclosure’ and it’s the thing that could make all these controversies go away.“
But Discord, like every other platform where young people meet, has an age-related challenge. On the one hand, Discorddoesn’t want its younger users encountering inappropriate content – or inappropriate people. On the other, it doesn’t want to place any restrictions on what adults share and say (as long as it’s legal).
For years, sites like Discord muddled along. But this won’t wash any more. Not in the era of social media bans for under 18s and online safety legislation. So Discord introduced a new approach to age verification.
And this week it all exploded. The firm had planned to start verifying the age of users in March. But following an outcry, it has postponed launch to the latter half of this year.
So what went wrong?
Discord had indicated it was going to default all user accounts to a ‘teen’ setting, which would restrict access to adult-oriented servers and limit some content. This caused a huge backlash.
Many users believed two things. First that everyone would need to verify. And second, that they would be required to scan their faces and upload their government IDs to be age-verified.
Discord said both perceptions were wrong. And this week, Discord CTO and co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy published a long blog to explain why.
The post gives a snapshot of everything that’s complicated about this topic. First is the belief among users that tech firms desperately want their data so they can sell it or use it for surveillance of some kind.
Vishnevskiy says: “I get that skepticism. It’s earned, not just toward us, but toward the entire tech industry. But that’s not what we’re doing.”
The second challenge is confusion around the techniques used. The way AV has evolved means that most systems try to use age estimation rather than age verification. They look at age indications rather than ask for proof. Discord’s methods include how long an account has existed, payment method on file and general patterns of account activity.
As Vishnevskiy says, these methods don’t read conversations or retain data. But despite this: many users still think they do.
A third issue is the belief that everyone will be checked. Discord argues that this is not so. Thanks to the age estimation techniques listed above, it says fewer than 10 percent of users will actually need to have an age check.
Vishnevskiy sums up as follows: “The idea is simple: we don’t want to know who you are. We just need to know whether you’re an adult.”
This is the crux of it all. The problem is explaining it clearly and defusing all the suspicion and fear that surrounds this topic.
We must hope that, as people get used to AV (which they will have to – it’s rolling out everywhere), the situation will improve. Digital wallets should help. Users will be able to share an encrypted token saying: ‘I am over 18’. This token will be entirely trustworthy and obviate the need for any other personal info. This is called ‘selective disclosure’ and it’s the thing that could make all these controversies go away.
Find out more about the themes discussed – Join the MEF APIs and Authentication Interest Group.
