It is specifically because you got banned for "being under 13" it comes from someone asking a question like "How many candles in this photo?" then you reply "7" then they edit the message to say "How old are you" and voila, underage ban.
What you are overlooking is that Discord is the new MSN Messenger, YIM, etc your friends are not backed up in a meaningful way, nor the servers you're in, if you lose your account, you lose contact with basically your entire internet life and friends.
Discord should not keep those IDs longer than a month at a time once the user is unbanned it should be deleted a week later, or removed from that panel altogether.
I'm not making excuses for companies retaining PII longer than they should. I'm simply stating why someone might give their ID. Another reason is to verify yourself as a bot developer, though supposedly that is usually done via an entirely different third party.
This should be a warning to anyone providing function in any way similar to what Discord is doing. Do not keep PII longer than you legally have to. Don't have to keep it at all? Delete it. Leave a redacted record such as "Image verified by x, removed on x after unban" or something simple if you must. Remove PII from ticketing systems especially on a platform like Discord where users want to be private by design.
The issue then becomes "well why don't they just go back to a Teamspeak server? they can self host it!"
But we're forgetting there that the average person online is not a dev. The most they usually know is how to point and click on something. Which also means they usually don't know how to spin up a Linux machine/VM somewhere and install their own chat server.
Discord is popular because it lets almost anyone on Earth point and click to create a chat "server". If someone can figure out how to do that (eg cPanel), you can absolutely break their moat.
Which is kinda sad. Way back in the mid-2000s, I was playing World of Warcraft with a few people I had met in the game itself. Later on, we chipped in to rent a TeamSpeak server from a company that offered ready-made servers and we had a lot of fun. You didn’t even have to do much admin work. :(
You still don't have to do much these services still exist, even for Mumble. Their limitation is scaling. So if you want way more than just a handful of people, you either start charging everyone an entrance fee, or you cap the server.
Discord's limitation is scaling as well, to be honest. It's incredibly hard to follow a server full of tens of thousands of people. Just because something can scale in a technical sense doesn't mean it will scale in a human one.
A bunch of UK users are blocked from the more "free speech" (over 13) channels unless they prove their identity to Discord, to comply with the Online Safety Act.
What would you say of a lot of FOSS companies/orgs who love to stay on places like Discord? Hell, some entities that pride themselves on "privacy" and "E2EE" shit are specifically on Discord. I think that must go beyond moronity.
Are you seriously blaming kids and teenagers (who spend their free time on Discord) because they are not smart enough to know better and form communities elsewhere?
You can do better than victim blame, and instead point the finger at Discord and whoever told the British government that delegating ID control to third-parties was a good idea.
No need to blame the user for the companies actions.
Company enacts policy enforced on them by law, for example requiring proof that a user is above the age of 18 to be able to use a channel where other users may use naughty words (The Horror!!!).
User struggles to use the automated age check system (I used the "guess age by letting an AI have a look at a selfie" method and it was a pain in the ass which failed twice before it finally worked) so does what is recommended and make a support ticket. [0]
User, relying on the published policy that Discord will delete ID directly after being used to to the age check [1] decides they wish to remain to have communication with their online friends uploads their ID.
Discord then fail to honour their end of the deal by deleting their users documents after use, and then get breached.
Full blame is on Discord for poorly handling their users data by their 3rd parties, and on the Governments forcing such practices. Discord should have their asses handed to them by the UK's ICO.
Sure, us geeks can and will use self hosted systems and find ways to avoid doing ID checks, but your avg joe isn't going to do that.
Hopefully cases like this will help with the push back on governments mandating these kind of checks, but I see the UK government just falling back to "think of the children" and laying all the blame on Discord, (who are not without fault in this case).
> Discord then fail to honour their end of the deal by deleting their users documents after use, and then get breached.
This wasn't documents uploaded via the automated ID checker, it was users manually sending ID documents to support in order to appeal an automated age decision.
> User, relying on the published policy that Discord will delete ID directly after being used to to the age check [1] decides they wish to remain to have communication with their online friends uploads their ID.
This is the part where the user has to take at least partial blame. You have to be utterly stupid (or at the very least way too sheltered) to believe a statement like this from a company, especially when there are zero consequences to the company for lying about it or negligently failing to live up to their policy.
In the UK we have the ICO (https://ico.org.uk/) who have the ability to fine companies who fail to live up to their data retention polices and/or fail to take adequate security measures to prevent or contain a serious personal data breaches.
If the UK Government are determined to enforce companies having to validate user ID's to use the company's services, then the government better well be determined to enforce our data protection laws too. Governments can not have it both ways (esp as the UK government also want to role out new digital IDs that will need to be checked when getting a new job), demanding users hand over ID to access services but not kick butts when those services fuck things up is just idiotic (Ok its the government, they make being idiots a profession), but that's not the fault of the user.
I'm mad at both Discord (for not securing their customers data inline with their published polices), and at the government (for forcing them into collecting the data in the first place, if Discord didn't have the data to begin with it can not be exposed).
But I can not be mad as users of a service, who though no fault of their own just wished to continue to be in communication with their friends and were faced with the no-win choice of providing ID or being denied access to a communication platform.
(just to be clear, I was not breached in this leak so I'm not being salty about the leak, but I see the point of view of the avg user because I see how the avg person uses the net every day.)
I'd have much more sympathy if this was the first instance ever of a corporation being negligent with people's data, and nobody was expecting it. We have to expect it, now. Corporations have a horrible track record of irresponsibility, and governments have a horrible track record of not punishing them. Data breaches are absolutely routine. Knowing this, it's very foolish to hand over ID through the Internet to someone. The top poster in this thread[1] has it right. At this point, you have to assume everything you submit or type into a web site is public information--that's how bad companies have gotten.
I assume if I run out into the middle of the motorway, I'm likely to get hit by a car. That's why I don't do that.
> I assume if I run out into the middle of the motorway, I'm likely to get hit by a car. That's why I don't do that.
The problem with this is that governments are now requiring you to cross the motorway if you wish to continue having the friends you have already made, but promise that the motorways are now safe for you to cross and they will hold to account anyone who makes crossing motorways unsafe, and the DoT have said "Its fine, we have put in crossings on the motorway to allow you to do so safely!"
Your avg joe is going to take those reassurances made by multiple parties and assume the activity that would otherwise be risky is safe under these circumstances.
When people go on thrill rides at amusement parks and get injured because the operator or manufacturer fucked up, we don't blame the rider "saying they should know better, look at all of those ride failures in the news!", as they expected the ride to be built to a high standard, it be maintained, operated corrected, and have safety watchdogs keeping an eye on everything.
I find it interesting where society draws the line in victim blaming. Because it is absolutely a spectrum, and there isn’t really a pattern. Personally, I don’t victim blame in this case, except for the people that explicitly voted for these short sighted “think of the children” politicians, but of course there’s no way to single them out here.
There's definitely a spectrum. Plenty of examples of people getting hurt through no fault of their own, and I would never assign blame to them. You're out walking your dog and get mugged--you did nothing risky, so you get no blame. But when you decide to do something risky, like skydiving or running in traffic or sending your government ID over the Internet (!!), and you suffer the known and anticipated downside risk, you need to at least share some of the blame. On the other side of the spectrum, if someone buys a penny stock and it loses all its value, that guy gets most of the blame.
Some other reply posted "Victim blaming!" as if that shuts down the discussion. It shouldn't.
Nobody believes the policy or even cares about the policy. They need to use the service, because everyone else is using the service, and they don't have a choice. Plain and simple.
There is nothing wrong with dividing up blame among both people who offer a risky choice and people who make the risky decision to accept that choice, just because one of them suffered the downside of that risk. There are a lot of other examples where if you screw something up you might get hurt, and the victim is definitely at fault. It's a spectrum, as someone else put it.
Sending your government ID over the Internet is a very risky decision, given the number and frequency of data breaches. The people who got burned here are not totally at fault but they share at least a little responsibility.
If Discord says they delete the PII they collect and they ultimately fail to do that, whether by malice or negligence Discord owns 100% of the blame.
If I get drunk and drive the wrong way down the highway and cause a wreck, the blame is not shared because the victim was driving a vehicle which is known to be a risky activity. I am culpable, full stop.
I hope we agree that there's a spectrum, and sometimes the victim is the one at fault. We just have to disagree about this specific case. I'm OK with that. All the best.
At this point a whole bunch of crypto exchanges including chinese ones have my driver's license, passport and more. It is what it is, any real KYC process will require video identification anyway.
