When Big Brother Meets Gaming Chat: The Discord Age Verification Mess
Well, this is it then. The moment we’ve all been dreading has finally arrived. Discord users across Australia are waking up to those lovely age verification screens, complete with the cheerful promise that your personal information will be “used for verification and then deleted.”
Right. And I’m the Queen of England.
The whole thing has me absolutely ropeable, to be honest. Here we have a law that was supposedly designed to “protect the children” but in practice is creating a surveillance state that would make George Orwell blush. The government has essentially outsourced identity verification to private companies – many of them foreign-owned – and we’re expected to just trust that they’ll do the right thing with our most sensitive data.
What really gets under my skin is the sheer dishonesty of it all. We’ve seen this playbook before, haven’t we? Remember the Optus data breach that exposed the personal information of nearly 10 million Australians? Or the Medibank hack? These weren’t even cases where companies were collecting additional biometric data or identity documents – they were just managing regular customer information, and they still managed to cock it up spectacularly.
Now we’re being asked to hand over driver’s licenses, passports, and even facial recognition data to platforms that have a track record of treating user privacy as an afterthought. Discord’s founder previously ran OpenFeint, a company that was literally designed around “accessing and disclosing personal information without authorization.” That’s not conspiracy theory nonsense – that’s documented fact from their own business plan.
The technical implementation is farcical too. Users are discovering they can fool the facial recognition system with Garry’s Mod characters, while actual humans with medical conditions like trismus (limited jaw movement) are being locked out entirely. It’s almost like the system was designed by people who’ve never actually interacted with real humans before.
But here’s what really pisses me off: this isn’t going to protect kids. Not even slightly. Every teenager I know is already discussing VPNs and workarounds. The only people this will actually impact are law-abiding adults who just want to chat about their hobbies or stay connected with friends. The “good kids” who follow rules will lose access to educational content and communities, while the problematic behaviour this law supposedly targets will simply move elsewhere.
If the government actually cared about protecting young people online, they’d invest in digital literacy education, critical thinking skills, and proper mental health support. But that costs money and takes effort. Much easier to slap a band-aid solution on the problem and claim victory while creating a massive privacy nightmare for everyone else.
The timing is suspicious as well. The UK is implementing similar measures, Canada’s working on their version, and New Zealand isn’t far behind. It’s almost like this is being coordinated across the Five Eyes alliance, isn’t it? Makes you wonder if this was ever really about protecting children, or if it’s more about creating a comprehensive system for tracking and monitoring online activity.
Look, I get it. The internet can be a rough place, and there are genuine concerns about kids being exposed to harmful content. But the solution isn’t to create a digital panopticon where every online interaction is tied to your government ID. That’s a cure that’s infinitely worse than the disease.
The most infuriating part is how powerless we all feel in the face of this. Sure, there’s a petition circulating, and I’ll be signing it, but let’s be realistic about the chances of this government backing down now. They’ve invested too much political capital in this disaster to admit they got it wrong.
For now, I suppose we’re all left with the same choice: comply and hand over our privacy, or walk away from platforms that have become integral parts of our social and professional lives. Neither option sits well with me, but I know which way I’m leaning.
The irony is delicious, really. A law designed to keep people safe is driving them away from regulated platforms and towards less secure alternatives. A law meant to protect privacy is creating the biggest privacy violation in Australian history. A law supposedly about protecting children is being circumvented by every tech-savvy teenager in the country.
Maybe it’s time to dust off those old IRC clients and go back to the days when online communities were built on trust rather than surveillance. At least then we knew where we stood.