I kid, I kid…

But this does seem to be a new trend sweeping the interwebs.  Last month it was Roblox, and this month it’s Discord.

Default Teen Experience

The web is turning into a movie theater where everyone can see G-rated movies, but if you want to see an R-rated flick, be prepared to show ID proving you’re 18.  Except that you’re not gaining brief entry into a theater but rather access to widely-used services you might visit for years.

Already, half of all US states have some form of age verification for accessing pornography.  These are trivial circumvent with VPN, because the providers don’t require much in the way of account verification, if you even need an account.  However, with Roblox or Discord, you must sign up and you can’t VPN your way around that.

These organizations – and more will surely follow – are under pressure to make sure that underage visitors can’t access inappropriate content.  Just putting up an interstitial that says “are you really 18?” doesn’t cut it legally.  Instead, companies are required to have some means of verifying that user123 is really 18 before user123 is allowed to access adult content.

And of course, “adult content” on Discord can be very different than “adult content” on PornHub.  There are porn Discords, but there are also squirrel hunting Discords that would run afoul of the “default teen experience”.  The intent is to prohibit minors from access content about sex, drugs, hate, gambling, gore, etc. but it’s a difficult balance.  Is buying crypto a high risk finance activity?  What about a Discord where people discuss a topic that isn’t itself high risk, but some users post images or use language that might be?  Is posting a link enough to flip the bit from “teen OK” to “adults only” on your Discord?

Showing ID

Unless you’ve ID’d, prepare to be limited to teen-friendly content.

A big problem here is the concept of showing ID.  To go back to the movie theater, when I was young enough to appear to possibly be under age 18, the ticket counter and ticket-ripping guy looked at my driver’s license.

When I was young enough to appear to be possibly under the age of 21, the bartender or party store clerk looked at my driver’s license.

But in neither case, did they copy it or store a digital copy of it.  I’m a lot more comfortable showing my ID to someone who isn’t allowed to copy it than I am uploading it to a site that might be hacked.

Like, you know, Discord was.

Looking at it from the provider’s perspective, even if these systems were perfectly secure, it puts a huge burden on them to securely manage such a system and take the legal liabilities if it’s hacked.

We’re stepping into an unpleasant new world.

And just to be clear, I really was kidding about LowEndTalk.