This morning, I received a response to a post I made about Discord’s ID verification process. The post blamed governments for Discord’s actions. This is a pattern I see often. I replied to the reply. With #Flatpak and #XDG ‘s recent actions, I feel it’s worthwhile to post this separately and modified slightly.

I advocate fighting our governments but that’s not what’s happening here. So far, there is no national law with a requirement that this type of invasive user IDing be done. Even if there were, Discord could sue the government. That’s one of the main ways these things get overturned since the very legislatures that implement these laws are unlikely to overturn them in a timely fashion without mass, nation disrupting action.

So far, these actions have happened at the state level. Bluesky’s reaction to Mississippi’s law was to block visitors from the state of Mississippi. That was the right call. Discord should have done the same and sued the states implementing these laws.

The fact that Discord chose to go out of their way to do something so bespoke, custom, and egregious hints that they were already working on it for other reasons entirely. Their whole modus operandi seems to be to gather as much user data as possible including for the purposes of develop AI models. I think it’s likely they built the systems they have specifically so they can market their solutions for identifying “underage” users. They want to be the ones selling this invasive tech to other companies. That’s way worse than merely proactively complying when they had so many other options to fight.

We have to stop making excuses for the companies that are not merely complying in advance but positioning themselves to profit from future tyranny.

In the case of Flatpak and XDG, they may not be preparing to profit from these laws but they certainly have more options than compliance with them.

#Discord #IDVerification