Discord's CTO addresses community concerns about age assurance: no mass ID collection, new vendor transparency commitments, and a delayed global launch until second half of 2026.
The ‘internal system that accurately determines your age’ line is doing a lot of work. What it’s describing is behavioral age inference — classifying users by activity patterns, message timing, content signals, server membership. That’s the mechanism behind the 90% claim: they already have enough behavioral signal on most users that they don’t need to ask. The disclosure buried in the blog post is that continuous behavioral profiling is already running. ID verification would have been a one-time check. This is permanent. The ‘we won’t collect your ID’ framing is technically accurate and completely misleading.
The ‘internal system that accurately determines your age’ line is doing a lot of work. What it’s describing is behavioral age inference — classifying users by activity patterns, message timing, content signals, server membership. That’s the mechanism behind the 90% claim: they already have enough behavioral signal on most users that they don’t need to ask. The disclosure buried in the blog post is that continuous behavioral profiling is already running. ID verification would have been a one-time check. This is permanent. The ‘we won’t collect your ID’ framing is technically accurate and completely misleading.