discord’s new age verification is about to spy on every message
kill switch
Kaleidoscope
4.7 • 635 Ratings
🗓️ 29 April 2026
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Discord announced it would start scanning users' account data to guess their age and if it couldn't figure out how old you were, it would ask for your government ID or a face scan. Gamers lost it, and within weeks, Discord backed down. But the fight isn't over. Dexter talks with Rin Alajaji of the Electronic Frontier Foundation about why age verification doesn't actually protect kids, how California's new Digital Age Assurance Act means your next laptop might card you before you can turn it on, and why a policy that started with gamers is quietly becoming everyone's problem.
Hit us up: killswitch@kaleidoscope.nyc, or @killswitchpod and @dexdigi on IG or Bluesky.
Links:
- EFF’s Age Verification and Age Gating: Resource Hub: https://www.eff.org/issues/age-verification
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an IHeart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:12.0 | Discord says it's cracking down on abuse. |
| 0:16.9 | Starting next month, the messaging app will require users to prove their age or be shut out from access to adult servers. |
| 0:25.2 | Earlier this year, Discord announced that it would start analyzing everyone's account data to figure out how old its users are. |
| 0:32.3 | Disco is all my gamers out there. What the hell are we using now? |
| 0:34.8 | The Discord is definitely not on our list of things to use. |
| 0:37.4 | So if you use Discord, you need to uninstall that shit right now because they're about to start |
| 0:41.4 | spying on every message you sent. If the platform thought you were underage, it would ask for ID. |
| 0:47.2 | And if you didn't give it, it would kick you off the platform. Welcome to the fight over age |
| 0:51.9 | verification. I think in practice, Discord and a lot of these online platforms are seeing age verification as a silver bullet. |
| 1:02.0 | The end-all, be-all answered to this problem of young people's safety online. |
| 1:08.0 | And I mean, it's, I think, a more complicated problem as we've seen. |
| 1:12.3 | The technology is not reliable. |
| 1:14.7 | It is not accessible or fully privacy protective at the moment or accurate to be used at such |
| 1:20.4 | a large scale. |
| 1:22.3 | Rin Alijaji is the Associate Director of State Affairs at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. |
| 1:26.9 | She says that even though age verification rules are put in place to keep children safe |
| 1:30.6 | online, the reality of what these rules actually do is a lot more complicated. |
| 1:37.9 | I don't disagree with the issue of young people needing privacy and safety online, |
| 1:43.8 | but I find it ironic that now these services are asking you to submit these deeply personal |
| 1:50.3 | pieces of information like your ID or your face or your credit card information or sometimes |
... |
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