getting a bunch of minors to take selfies of themselves to upload to a server somewhere while training an ai model will definitely have no problems....
Thing is Discord will have no problems getting them to do it. By the time any legal proceedings against it work their way through the legal system, the damage will long since have been done. Discord will have made the money from the data they collected, the AI models will be done, and the need for more pictures will be non-existent.
Yikes, we gotta get on improving Element and Matrix as a replacer ASAP. My apologies for shillery, I don't normally hock FOSS alternatives in the comments but I view this sort of offense by Discord as a militant action level of threat.
The feature none of them seem to have is creating a set of rules that users have to read and agree to before seeing the rest of the space, such is the case with Discord Community Channels.
I mean I'm usually not the skeptic when it comes to privacy rights, but it's hard for me to defend against an action like this. Because I don't see a purpose of needing that information outside of the intent to sell to third party
I couldn't imagine an AI model will be very accurate of being able to identify a 11 year old vs a 13 year old. I assume this is more to try and vett whether they can access NSFW channels or not, but honestly since humans can't properly vett that, I don't know how an AI is supposed to reliably do that.
Considering that most stores still ID for people that look between the age 21 and 40 for age restricted content, I can't imagine an AI will help with that much
I don’t see reporting on this from any reputable sources. If this were true, every major blog covering tech and gaming would be all over it. All I can find is random YouTube channels and nobody websites discussing it.
I’m not gonna pay it any attention until there’s reliable evidence they’re actually planning on doing this.
NTTS is someone I've watched for a while who spends lots of time looking at and reporting on upcoming discord features, as well as scams and CSAM material on the platform. He's very clear in the videos when something is rumored, added to the client as a beta feature, etc.
I personally use Matrix.org so I can just set up a chat room and itll be hosted there. Of course if you want to self host a matrix instance for you and your friends thats an option, or some of your friends can use the self hosted instance and some other instances (Matrix is a federated protocol).
Maybe it's the interests I have, but those chat rooms may have people but not a lot of activity. Also, the specific people I want to chat with don't use Matrix.
The big issue they've had, imo, is that there's too many bots and too many IRC bridges from stubborn oldies who refused to migrate away from IRC.
There was a time when freenode went down that many channels were experiencing an exodus, which would have been the perfect time for Matrix adoption, but people were far too stubborn with IRC despite its many flaws (privacy, lack of history, poor feature set, etc.)
Is Dalnet even still around? I stopped using IRC way back in the day because they said they were shutting it down and it was really the only server I used.
Do we have concrete proof of this happening now or in the near future? Does the video provide any? I need to know whether to sound the alarm now, or wait till there's something concrete to show people. (You can probably understand my hesitation to share a scarily titled YT video as my only proof)
The error rate is probably pretty high. There are people with a "baby face" as well as people who look older than they are. Even the best AI can't predict something that isn't predictable, like the age by looking at a photo. You can get rough estimates, but no AI can discern between a 17,9 year old and a 18 year old.
Wow, good on you for achieving that. I had a few friends and family on signal, but after they dropped SMS support they all left, now I have no signal contacts anymore.
I'm still incredibly frustrated they did that. I often heard "I'll just text you" in reply to "I'm leaving snap". Having an all-in-one app would've made that so much easier.
They do technically still offer a "manual review", which is what they do now, where you have to take a photo using any kind of camera with your photo ID and email it... which isn't really better, and can be very, very slow in actually regaining access to an account.
"Questionable activity" is an easily abused term for power-tripping assholes. Especially with right-wing politics becoming so prevalent world-wide, it's easy (for example) to imagine a scenario where a group of LGBTQ+ types are targeted for harassment - being forced to choose between losing their safe haven or outing themselves & putting themselves at risk of far worse.
I don't join any servers. It's a voice replacement for ventrilo, which I would consider using if I can get a music bot tos tresm music to everyone in the channel.
It's a program I will only use on a computer when playing videogames. Discord isn't a social thing for me, but a voice chat for my friends playing videogames.
This was a wtf moment for me. Even though Discord’s privacy isn’t the best, and even though it’s proprietary, Discord has been seemingly loyal to its user base, even doing cool stuff like offering a Linux version of the app. However, if this becomes mandatory, I will promptly leave, I am horrified that they have fallen this low.
Holy shit this can actually be a blessing because you can fake an ID as well. Just automate the entire process I am now John Doe and so are all of you.
And Signal's SMS feature. I'd love to gradually move my contacts over to something else, and being able to convince one at a time to switch their SMS client would make that so much easier.
I used to run a Revolt server 3 years ago. The sound quality was beyond any other WebRTC service I had tried, but it was still in an early and it was lacking a lot of features. So, I switched to Element and Jitsi.
I would recommend Signal and maybe Tox (protocol, has several clients).
Signal is a nonprofit. They make it a point not to collect your data. Just the phone number. Military folks seem to like them.
Tox is not a centralized entity at all, anarchists seem to like it. Multiple Tox clients exist and use a common protocol and network. Messaging happens via peer-to-peer, lookups make use of servers. For messaging to occur, both communicating parties have to be online, so don't expect much convenience.
Oh my God it's been so many years since I've heard of tox I set up a q-tox account years ago, then no one used the platform so I just let it rest. I think I have my identity key is still stored on my developer sync, I forgot that platform existed
I use signal with my wife and daughter for texting, does it also offer group servers? I keep in touch with most of my business customers through my shop’s discord server.
Hmmm. So how long before another AI is able to generate a good enough face to fool the age verification AI (or can it already)? Interesting three-legged race there.
you and me and some others on here understand using matrix and signal and whatever for E2EE chats. The people who use discord/facebook messenger/imessage/sms/whatsapp DO NOT GIVE A SHIT about this stuff. They are only going to use what is in pop culture. That's how it is and i know it sucks, but people think its easy to "Get your family/friends over" whey they laugh at you and say "im not downloading just use x plz"
Here's the thing... People who care still use Discord. I'm one of them. I have no other option for maintaining communications with a group of 20 people I have been gaming with since 2009. We've all hopped from Skype to Teamspeak to Ventrillo to Discord. There's no going back for many of these people.
Like it or not, Discord offers a product that Signal, Briar, or any other Matrix chat offers and that's accessibility. I would love for a mainstream E2EE chat program that actually can host a 15 person call, hold multiple chatrooms in one server, allow screen sharing, streaming and multimedia sharing.
We can't just live in a vacuum and claim nobody uses these programs because they're stupid or don't care. For many, like me, Discord a reasonable security risk people are willing to take in order to maintain communications with people they care about.
then we need something new and hot and flashy to communicate on. Why not make it a way to work together too? This sounds like a good idea, if you know of a good way to make this system then you'd have my vote
The annoying thing is that a lot of support or even downloadable content is on Discord exclusively. We've had similar shitty trends with Facebook, Tumblr, etc. and it just is annoying. People claim it's where most people are but ignore the fact that it is impossible to access for everyone who is not.
In my country politicians upload their policies exclusively on authwalled sites. The website just links to authwalled social media accounts. Its infuriating.
This is what it takes for you to finally leave discord?
I would guess most people that have managed to stick around discord this long won't even mind this.
Oh, the service itself is decent, up to great depending on your criteria. Pretty much never down, works well enough, etc.
It's the privacy and bullshit behind the service that's hated. Well, usually, some people hate the layout, and others hate the fact that it's the default for so many people that it's difficult to avoid.
In addition to other comments, it's a terrible replacement for forums. Information gets buried quickly, is hard to sort and search through, and conversations get scrambled.
it's a venture capital-backed startup that has been very eager to exit its growth phase and enter its aggressive monetization phase so it can start making its shareholders some money. They've already tried a few things that didn't work, like trying to turn it into a Steam competitor.
The service to date is mostly fine. If you're like most people who don't mind exchanging some privacy and control for access to an app that has a nonzero professional UX design budget, it's pretty fantastic. But the writing has been on the wall for a long time that enshittification is near on the horizon. It's not a question of if, but how soon.
if that happens to me and discord wants me to send selfies to my self,Am going to Matrix and maybe use my discord alt to take to my friends who dont wanna use matrix.
If something like this happens, I'm setting up a Matrix room as something on the side for if people who work on the same project I do want out of this garbage.
If that's the computing you want to do then power to ya. I'd rather the software running on my machine do what I want, rather than work around it doing what someone else wants.
Eh, we used it as an office chat until my boss set up Slack, and then kept using it when we played games after work. It was okay.
I never joined any public channels though, only the handful of ones with various gaming friends. They have since moved on with life, so I uninstalled Discord.