Discord concludes Persona age verification test after investor ties draw concern

Last July’s UK Online Safety Act deadline prompted many platforms to tighten age checks, from facial scans to requests for government ID. Discord’s own system has been criticized as easy to game and was hit by a breach that exposed about 70,000 users’ IDs; the company has said it plans to roll out age verification more widely, with a target of March, and some users have already been prompted to verify their age using a third-party service called Persona.

Persona, founded in 2018, builds identity detection and anti-fraud technology and has been used to verify users on sites including Reddit and Roblox. Concerns have centered on its backers: one of Persona’s largest investors is the Founders Fund, which helped value the company at $1.5 billion and put $150 million toward it in 2021, and is associated with Peter Thiel, the cofounder of Palantir.

Discord has described prompts from Persona as part of “an experiment” and said any information collected would be stored for seven days.

United Kingdom

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