They got a world where the dollar is worth 10% less, where their customers turn away to EU alternatives, where the US isn’t seen as stable anymore, where the impartiality of the US corporate legal framework is no longer trusted. As the icing on the cake we’re now turning toward handmaid’s tale-style puritanical law (see also: SAVE act).

You can do business with a country with a thriving middle class, the most scientific research output on the planet, the world’s foremost technological and product innovations, and a dynamic, growing economy. Or you can do business with the USA. No wonder Canada is intersted in importing Chinese cars instead of American ones, because they’re better and cheaper.

Corporations know that doing business in the US has a lot of the risks of doing business in Russia. If Dear Leader sours on your company, expect to pay bribes or be forced to divest.

I hope these new draconian rules harm people like Elon and Zuck by reducing the appeal of their platforms.

I am not claiming that Discord in particular supports MAGA, but the industry as a whole has been enablers. At best they are complicit and silent.

The American two party system is essentially a choice between corporate stability (Democrats) and the actual mafia (MAGA Republicans). We elected a convicted felon who has been a literal part of the Russian mafia for decades.

Pardon me if I don't have a lot of trust in their ability to keep it safe.

Why isn’t this delivered via some sort of notification, menu, pop-up, etc? DMs seem prime for phishing

This clearly doesn't work and they're surely aware of it. Perhaps it's even intentional as a choice to give kids a way out, just trying to cover their own asses in regards to regulation.

Why doesn't Discord require ALL users to upload their faces to prove that they are at least 13 years old and eligible to use the service?

Does it mean that even people who reside outside jurisdictions touched by the age verification craze will have to deal with all this?

> use facial age estimation

Surely a kid won't be able to ask someone else to pass the check for them. But let's talk about false positives. If the estimator falsely declares someone an adult, is Discord legally liable?

> submit a form of identification

If you have a picture of an ID document, can you verify that it's real? You'd have to ask the government for that. And at least in one country there is no process for that.

> On-device processing

Oh, a client-side check. Must be secure.

The company that Discord uses lists the methods they accept above. Notably, they do not accept any privacy-protecting digital identity standards from US or EU citizens; they only implement national ID verifications where they receive a full birthdate, with the sole exception of AU where they allow banks to attest to age-majority.

Leveraging this press to highlight their clear desire-for / dependency-on being provided an explicit birthdate, rather than simply a bool backed by the government, would be an effective lever to pull through e.g. New York and California governmental privacy efforts — especially if one somehow got them classified as a data broker in California and therefore bound to a much more expensive set of laws, due to their insistence on being provided PII when more privacy-protecting alternatives are available there.

Yes, this isn’t a scorched earth response. Every other thread of discussion here has that covered already and I have nothing new to add there. But for anyone looking to force privacy into the budding age checks verification market at an early stage rather than trying to shut it down, here’s your roadmap to effecting real change on the matter. Good luck.