Discord age verification has rolled out worldwide and I find this to not make any sense in terms of how age estimation works.
I have 2 accounts, One is an old main account that I don't actively use anymore, the account is 8 years old, and the other is the one I mainly use which is almost 6 years old, Discord claims that their model estimates your age by just looking at your profile and your activity, and apparently things aren't making sense, discord looked at my oldest account profile, saw that there's only 1 favorite game board which is a mature game, saw my chococat profile picture and the amount of servers and friends I am in and said that I am all good and that I am adult, But that's not the case with my main account.
because in my main account, I only joined 12 servers, had a lot of game stuff on my board, stuff like that and the account is basically almost 6 years old which should convince discord that I am already old (because I believe that their model assumes that users who signed up on discord are exactly 13 years old) but discord said that I am teen, and I am trying to find any sense to how the model came up to a conclusion like this, If I can take a wild guess, it's probably because my main account is themed around chococat and espresso (basically hello kitty stuff for you simple people) but my oldest account is barely themed, which is funnny enough considering that both accounts have chococat in the profile picture.
Anyways, I tried using selfie bypassing and I failed 3 times and discord took away the ability to do so, So be very careful if you are going to do the same like I did.
and you might be asking, why don't you just give them away your face or your id anyways, they promised that they won't save your data anyways
My friend, this whole stuff goes way deeper than that, On paper yes they do not store photos itself but I would like to remind you that K-ID and Persona CAN NOT BE TRUSTED AT ALL, While K-ID promises you that your photo never leaves your device, the metadata and measurements aren't, and they are stored indefinitely, Measurements such as k-id attempt and verification id (can be used to link back to a discord account), genuinesss scores, speeds of face moving, biometrics about face (blur scores, glare ratios, prediction outputs, bounding boxes), metadata about camera, metadata about device, audio and video devices (serial numbers. aspect ratios, names), metadata about your browser (fingerprint, generally everything in a user-agent), device region geolocated by ip address.
Persona on the other hand just straight up saves your photos to their database whenever they like.
but aside from the 2 id vendors, They are nothing but just another middlemen who shares your sensitive data to 'other parties' to further verify your identify and those 'other parties' have different polices, some of them even saves your data while the middlemen vendors like k-id don't, So your photo didn't 'leave your device' on paper, but looking deep, the data is still being collected and stored anyways.
so why you should be worried about your sensitive data being shared with companies/services?
One of the golden rules of the internet (and the ones you have heard a lot from your parents) is to never share any personal details of yours on the internet, this includes of course, your ID and your face, for you to give your face or your ID to ID vendors, you would have to trust them with your data but they are not transparent enough with how the data is secured/handled, and security breaches are common these days, meaning that hackers could hack ID vendors and it's third parties and leak all sensitive information stored in their servers to the public web.
why is discord doing all of this? They are not being forced to roll this out on all countries.
Truth is, yeah they aren't forced to do that, However they are doing that to prevent future lawsuits, Discord has been receiving so many lawsuits about child safety worldwide and they usually end up paying hefty sum of money for the damages, Which obviously means that discord is heavily losing money because of constant lawsuits they receive from many different countries, so they have no other issues but to voluntarily implement age verification system so that they don't end up losing money from lawsuits, and in my personal opinion, you really can't blame discord for this despite they are doing the bare minimum to add a better safety measures, parents are not educated on how they restrict access to websites or even see what their kids/teens are talking to, and especially governments from many different countries are also starting to push companies to do the same.
But don't get me wrong here, I completely oppose the age verification system because corporates and services can not be trusted with sensitive user data.
But this discord update doesn't completely change anything, it's only an issue for adults who wants to access to 18+ channels and I am personally not bothered by this update at all because I can access my older account whenever I want and view restricted features and I am not the type of user who uses 18+ channels on a daily basis.
so what's the safest way to verify your age?
it's actually tough to say 'the safest way' to verify age, but using credit cards is the safest option out of all the options available to verify age, assuming that you make purchases on platforms like discord, you shouldn't be bothered to give discord your credit card to verify your age, Of course not every adult wants to have a credit card or have access to credit cards for whatever the reasons, However you can use face estimation and play gmod with face manipulations to bypass the face verification.
I am as disappointed as you that discord implemented this voluntarily, my experience on discord hasn't significantly compromised, and I don't mind this change as long as I can talk to everyone normally.