The enforcement of the Online Safety Act requires some online platforms to put in place “robust” age verification measures. In response, Discord users must now either use a face scanner or upload a photo of their ID to confirm their age. Madeleine Stone, Senior Advocacy Officer for privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch, has warned about the use of this dangerous technology:
“Children must be protected online, but many technological age checking methods are ineffective and introduce additional risks to children and adults alike including security breaches, privacy intrusion, errors, digital exclusion and censorship.
Requiring users to hand over sensitive biometric data to social media platforms poses a real risk to privacy and security online.
Many technological age assurance methods can be easily circumvented and shouldn’t be seen as a silver bullet solution, whilst parental controls, user controls and age ratings are other recognised, reliable methods to protect children from inappropriate content online.”
BBC – Discord’s face scanning age checks ‘start of a bigger shift’