It appears that Discord will ask you for a selfie or government ID to check your age soon. It was for a few regions, and it’ll be rolling out globally.

Sure, backlash has already happened, some folks I know are cancelling Nitro subs and even killing private servers. I’m fine with it because I got nothing to hide.

So does that mean I’m fine with this decision? No, of course I’m not. I can understand why Discord would do such a thing (much easier to maintain it globally than just locally, plus laws in different countries), but that doesn’t mean I want to share everything. In fact you have to share some information at some point, and unless you are completely paranoid (to an extreme degree), someone will be using that information.

The issue here is that, while I got nothing to hide, I’d rather not leave it completely exposed.

Not Leaving Out in the Open

Alright, so, let me talk about something. Having nothing to hide about yourself doesn’t mean you don’t want to keep it private. What you do with your private information is up to you, and you keep it tighter if you wish. But that makes things considerably harder on yourself.

I’ll use, for example, my country. We have our own national identity number called CPF (Cadastro de Pessoas Físicas, ‘Physical Persons Register’) where it’s used for everything. Wanna buy something? Wanna invest? Wanna buy a property? Wanna start a company? Wanna create a bank account? Wanna buy a phone number? Many many things use this NIN and you have to input it in, meaning that everyone already has your data. From your CPF, they could look up your address, phone numbers, e-mail, real name, etc.

Sounds nightmarish, right? But if you wanna buy anything, you need to input it. It’s a number that could be a massive point of failure if discovered by at the same time, it allows you to do a lot, so…

Which is why, to me, this sort of check feels okay and the response is completely overblown (United-statesians being ridiculous? You don’t say!), and thus I’m fine with it.

However, a point I must make here: I don’t disclose my private information unless it’s absolutely necessary. Privacy is indeed important, but I don’t go out giving my private information to people or companies unless it’s necessary. Unless I go buy something from a website, I keep my information private. My nickname is all you know about me, and any attempts to ‘know me better’ will be met with ‘sorry, but I like to keep it private’. Unless you are a good person and someone I have spoken a lot, it’s not gonna be something I share. And even more, I don’t share my CPF number to anyone anyway.

Required To Share

There are some things that are indeed required to share, unfortunately. Any certifications you take (like my Azure Fundamentals, CompTIA Security+ and Linux+, and ITIL V4 for example) will require you to share your personal information in order to confirm that you are who you say you are. Better yet, the exams require you to have your ID to verify you as well, because fraud exists.

That’s just how it is, I can’t do anything about it, and I need certifications to do my work, so I’ll have to share it. And considering how things are, I’m glad it is this way.

At some point in the past, one of my accounts for an e-tailer asked me to verify myself, to confirm I was who I said I was. So I took a selfie with my ID and they got back to me saying that ‘yup, checks out’ and let me access my account. So the process of Discord doing the same thing? I’ve done it already.

Closing Words

Discord has many problems, and none of them are related to people being so impossible to handle that the government has to make a required for them to implement this. They probably didn’t want to do it, but since they’ll have to, might as well do this. They are certainly covering their asses because they would rather not get sued over being stupid.

But that does not mean that privacy is dead or that we should just share. To me, you can control how much you can share. Trying to not share anything will just cause you harm in the long run, so instead of having a ‘eh, just do it’ attitude, I recommend people to mind what they share because they can use it against you.