Discord postpones age verification rollout amid criticism, promises transparency

Discord, the popular platform for gamers to communicate online, is postponing its controversial age verification policy after receiving swift backlash from users with concerns about their privacy.

The global rollout of the system is now delayed to the second half of 2026, Discord's Chief Technology Officer and co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy wrote in a Tuesday blog post acknowledging that the company ''missed the mark.''

''Many of you are worried that this is just another Big Tech company finding new ways to collect your personal data. That we're creating a problem to justify invasive solutions,'' Vishnevskiy wrote. ''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.''

Discord, which says it has more than 200 million active users, will continue to meet specific legal obligations it has for age verification of users, the company said, but the global expansion of age verification will only come after it makes changes to the initial policy it laid out in early February.

The company announced earlier this month that it would roll out an age verification policy in March that would include face scanning or requests for an ID upload for users it could not determine were adults. This drew swift ire from users. Many pointed to a recent security breach of a third-party provider Discord worked with that exposed government ID photos of up to 70,000 Discord users.

Vishnevskiy referenced the security breach in the blog post, writing that he understood that incident added to users' skepticism, but he emphasized the company no longer works with that vendor and has rigorous standards for its partners.

''Every vendor we work with goes through a security and privacy review before integration,'' he wrote. ''That includes contractual limits on data use, and strict retention and deletion requirements. Information submitted for age verification is stored only for the minimum time necessary, which in most cases means it's deleted immediately. If a vendor doesn't pass, we don't work with them.''

The company distanced itself from Persona after that relationship also became the subject of online criticism. Persona is backed by the venture capital firm Founders Fund, which is run by Palantir Technologies co-founder Peter Thiel. Thiel and Palantir are often criticized for of the company's partnerships with the government for surveillance purposes, with Palantir recently inking an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to streamline the process of identifying and deporting people the agency is targeting.

Rick Song, Persona's co-founder and CEO, wrote in a statement posted to LinkedIn that Discord's claims about Persona's capabilities were not accurate, emphasizing that the company does offer on-device age verification.

''I'm fine if they don't want to use us. I'm not okay with them publicly saying untrue things about our age assurance technologies to try to shift responsibility away from their own decisions,'' he wrote. ''Doing so further erodes trust.''

The backlash to the original policy and even the revised version came even though Vishnevskiy wrote that for ''90%+ of users, nothing changes.''

Discord is able to proactively determine the ages of the vast majority of users by looking at account-level signals. Those include how long the account has existed, whether there is a payment method on file, the types of servers a user is in and general patterns of account activity, Vishnevskiy wrote. He emphasized the company does not read messages, analyze conversations or look at account content to estimate users ages.

Users who choose not to verify their age will get to keep their account, servers, friends list, direct messages and voice chat, but will not be able to access age-restricted content or change certain default safety settings designed to protect teens, Vishnevskiy wrote.