“We are not novices in terms of technology,” he said.
After receiving a data dump on his daughter’s Discord account, some things immediately became strange for Frey.
“There’s no age recorded in the signup, but there’s something worth noting: her data includes an age_group field set to ’13-17,’ confirming that Discord’s system knows she’s a teenager,” Frey told Ars.
According to the data, Discord updated this field on March 9, about nine days before the account was hacked on March 18.
“They changed the age on their side, even though we can’t change the age on our side,” Frey said.
Additionally, Frey noticed that a separate field, “is_underage,” was set to “false.” He told Ars that he thinks “the discrepancy matters because the underage flag potentially controls whether strict advertising protections for children” are implemented.
Since her daughter set up the account with 18+ settings, it’s possible the fields correspond to her self-reported age. But Frey could see that Discord updated the setting twice: once two days after the hack, and again after her account was restored. Each time, she was marked as underage, despite support forum messages that repeatedly informed Discord that she was 13 years old.
What this appears to mean is that the platform can build “a broad behavioral advertising profile” on teens, even if its internal system classified them in the 13-17 age group, Frey said.
Samantha Baldwin, policy and research staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told Ars that Discord’s hesitation to formally update the age setting is understandable. Frey’s case shows why privacy advocates believe age verification laws are not about “protecting children” but about “surveillance and censorship,” he said.
“They will not reclassify an account from a minor, that’s clearly demonstrated,” Baldwin said. “Discord is in the business of making money by selling their users’ personal data. They are implementing ‘age verification’ to meet regulatory compliance and collect more data about their customers, not to protect children.”
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