// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
An update on how we confirm your age group on Discord
In February, after listening to your feedback, I shared that we were delaying our announced plans for global age assurance. I promised we'd come back in the second half of the year with a more transparent, clearer path forward, with less friction. Here's where we landed.
Age assurance draws strong opinions and skepticism, especially when it involves sharing biometric information or a form of ID. At the same time, age assurance laws are expanding, and since my last post we've had to launch age assurance in other regions, including in Brazil and in Texas. We're hearing from policymakers in countless states and countries who want stronger teen protections, from the European Union to Indonesia. To me, that makes it more important than ever to show that this can be done in a privacy-preserving way: one where more than 90% of you won’t have to confirm your age.
That's why, starting tomorrow, we'll automatically place you in an age group using account signals, like how long your account has existed and the kinds of servers you're part of. We use multiple account signals to determine age groups at an accuracy level matching what’s possible with biometrics. No single server determines your age group, and we don't look at your messages, calls, or other content to decide which age group you’re in.
If you just want to know your age group: Go to User Settings > Account Status. We're launching this over the course of this week, so it may take a few days to reach your account. If you don't see anything yet, check back later. Your age group isn't shown on your profile or visible to other members in a server. Here's what each age group status means:
If you're an adult but you weren't automatically placed in the adult age group, you can fix it by confirming your age group in User Settings > Account Status.
Here's more on what we did since February and how age assurance works.
The goal hasn't changed: build in more protections for teens, while keeping the experience unchanged for adults. We don’t want or need to know more information about you aside from your age group, and for most of you we can determine that based on basic signals like account age.
In February, I set conditions we'd meet before expanding. Here's each one and where it stands:
We believe meeting age requirements shouldn’t require ID checks or selfies for everyone. We'd prefer to give you more choices, including less intrusive options that don't require biometrics or sensitive personal data. That’s why we built an age estimation model based on account signals to determine your age group. Because of it, more than 90% of you will not be asked to confirm your age.
Our age group estimation model looks at patterns of account behavior on Discord. It does not look at your messages, calls, or other content. For example, the way a typical teen uses Discord will look different in aggregate from how a typical 30-year-old uses Discord. Our model has learned these patterns and uses them to estimate whether a given account most likely belongs to an adult (18+) or a teen (13-17).