We’ve been saying this for years now, and we’re going to keep saying it until the message finally sinks in: mandatory age verification creates massive, centralized honeypots of sensitive biometric data that will inevitably be breached. Every single time. And every single time it happens, the politicians who mandated these systems and the companies that built them act shocked—shocked!—that collecting enormous databases of government IDs, facial scans, and biometric data from millions of people turns out to be a security nightmare.
Well, here we go again.
A couple weeks ago, Discord announced it would launch “teen-by-default” settings for its global audience, meaning all users would be shunted into a restricted experience unless they verified their age through biometric scanning. The internet, predictably, was not thrilled. But while many users were busy venting their frustration, a group of security researchers decided to do something more useful: they took a look under the hood at Persona, one of the companies Discord was using for verification (specifically for users in the UK).
What they found, according to The Rage, was exactly what we would predict:
Together with two other researchers, they set out to look into Persona, the San Francisco-based startup that’s used by Discord for biometric identity verification – and found a Persona frontend exposed to the open internet on a US government authorized server.
In 2,456 publicly accessible files, the code revealed the extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users, bundled in an interface that pairs facial recognition with financial reporting – and a parallel implementation that appears designed to serve federal agencies.
Let me say that again: 2,456 publicly accessible files sitting on a government-authorized server, exposed to the open internet. Files that revealed a system performing not a simple age check, but a ton of potentially intrusive checks:
Once a user verifies their identity with Persona, the software performs 269 distinct verification checks and scours the internet and government sources for potential matches, such as by matching your face to politically exposed persons (PEPs), and generating risk and similarity scores for each individual. IP addresses, browser fingerprints, device fingerprints, government ID numbers, phone numbers, names, faces, and even selfie backgrounds are analyzed and retained for up to three years.
The information the software evaluates on the images themselves includes “Selfie Suspicious Entity Detection,” a “Selfie Age Inconsistency Comparison,” similar background detection, which appears to be matched to other users in the database, and a “Selfie Pose Repeated Detection,” which seems to be used to determine whether you are using the same pose as in previous pictures.
This was the same company checking whether a teenager should be allowed to use voice chat on a gaming platform.
Beyond offering simple services to estimate your age, Persona’s exposed code compares your selfie to watchlist photos using facial recognition, screens you against 14 categories of adverse media from mentions of terrorism to espionage, and tags reports with codenames from active intelligence programs consisting of public-private partnerships to combat online child exploitative material, cannabis trafficking, fentanyl trafficking, romance fraud, money laundering, and illegal wildlife trade.
So you wanted to verify you’re old enough to use voice chat, and now there’s a permanent risk score somewhere documenting whether you might be involved in illegal wildlife trafficking.
What could go wrong?
As the researchers put it to The Rage:
“The internet was supposed to be the great equalizer. Information wants to be free, the network interprets censorship as damage and routes around it, all that beautiful optimism. And for a minute it was true.”
[….]
“The state wants to see everything. The corporations want to see everything. And they’ve learned to work together.”
Discord, to its credit, has now said it will not be proceeding with Persona for identity verification. And to be fair, Discord and similar internet companies are in an impossible position here—facing mounting regulatory pressure in multiple jurisdictions to verify ages while being handed a market of vendors who keep turning out to be security nightmares. But this is part of a pattern that should be deeply familiar by now.
Just last year, Discord’s previous third-party age verification partner suffered a breach that exposed 70,000 government ID photos, which were then held for ransom. Discord said it stopped using that vendor. Then it moved to Persona, which was already raising concerns due to connections to Peter Thiel. Now Persona’s frontend is found wide open on a government-authorized server, and Discord is dropping them too.