Discord Wants Your Face, Here's Why You Should Say No

"Discord presents its move as inevitable. It's not. I know that Discord isn't trying to harm anyone. The company genuinely believes it's protecting users. But good intentions don't prevent the drift. They accelerate it. There's also the risk that the collected data becomes exposed."

"Our movement is skeptical of concentrated power no matter its source-particularly the power to know, track, and categorize citizens. This is true whether that power comes from governments, corporations and, more narrowly, online community platforms."

"Open-source platforms built on federation models-services like -don't require identity verification to participate. They're privacy-by-design, not privacy-theater. They may be slower to scale and lack Discord's network effects, but they're also immune to the pressure that turns 'safety features' into surveillance infrastructure."

Discord's implementation of age verification through facial recognition and ID scans represents a concerning normalization of surveillance practices justified by safety rhetoric. While KYC requirements ostensibly serve protective purposes, they function as incremental steps that shift acceptable baselines and expand data collection. The cryptocurrency community's skepticism toward concentrated power—whether governmental or corporate—makes this particularly problematic, as platforms gain unprecedented ability to know, track, and categorize users. Although Discord's intentions may be genuine, good intentions accelerate rather than prevent surveillance drift. Open-source alternatives built on federation models and cryptographic protocols offer solutions that invert power dynamics, allowing users to maintain control while platforms cannot access personal data.

Read at Bitcoin Magazine