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Children are drawing moustaches on their faces to fool online age checks - and it's working; fake birthdays, borrowed IDs, and creative facial hair bypass age checks (www.internetmatters.org)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 4 points 6 months ago (19 children)

Anyone know the best way to fool these age verification tools? I've got some Discord servers with channels that are marked as NSFW mainly out of an abundance of caution, despite mainly just being open to rude language. And others where it's just slightly spicy memes.

I am old enough, I just don't want to give my real face or ID to Discord or their chosen third parties. I don't trust them. Have tried pointing OBS at videos of people staring straight at the screen, but those don't quite seem to work.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Well, there's always the ancient method that teens used to get their hands on alcohol when I was that age: pay someone who's down on their luck for ten minutes of their time.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    That feels kinda gross and exploitative. Because it's not like alcohol. This is something I very well could do myself, but refuse to do on principle, because I don't want to hand over personal data like that. Paying someone else to hand over their data feels gross.

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  • [+] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago

    Don’t give Discord any info

    That's the idea. I'm hoping people have an idea of some method to bypass it that actually works. Maybe a particular video or game that still works well. Giving them useless data.

    Fwiw, they don't do the age verification themselves. They contract it out to a third party. And as much as I trust neither entity very far, I do trust that the third party probably isn't handing over that data to Discord. I'm more worried about the third-party being hacked/leaking data, which has already happened.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago* (13 children)

    Don't use discord? Problem solved.

    And I really am serious. We need to move away from platforms we have no control over and contribute to the problem.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago (6 children)

    We probably shouldn't be using Discord but you've got to meet people where they're at. Telling someone to just drop a service when all of their connections are there is unhelpful at best.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    What else are you supposed to tell them? Its like an abusive relationship, do we just tell them "oh well" you get something out of it so just stay in it?

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago

    I mean if you want to help someone in an abusive relationship, telling them to just leave doesn't really work there either, and for a lot of the same reasons. But you can support them in other ways until they're able to do what's necessary to leave.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    We probably shouldn’t be using Discord

    It's a useful tool for a variety of organizational goals. Why should we have to leave? They're the ones that suck.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago*

    Ultimately Discord is a corporate-owned social media platform, and like all corporate-owned social media platforms their best interests rarely intersect with the best interests of their users. Centralised systems like Discord always end up with a power imbalance between the users and the administrators, and if you break their rules they have it within their power to just vapourise your community without a second thought. Your organisation or community only exists for as long as you toe their line.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    Thanks, but that is a thoroughly unhelpful piece of advice.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

    So keep fighting the corporate entity and keep making things worse by supporting them?

    I don't know what else to tell you. You have no control, so you get what you deserve by continuing to use it. And when you continue to use it, it keeps other people thinking they need to use it, and the pain continues. Its a classic it hurts when I do this, so the answer is "stop doing that".

    Do you really need discord to be your chat server?

    So to actually offer advice if you are determined to have a discord like experience: you could try Fluxer and if they implement the same restrictions you could try self hosting it.

    Editing to add: Fluxer.app as the url.

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