I don't know if I just became cynical and jaded, but is this really surprising to anyone in any way? Any time I give out my personal information to anyone for any reason, I basically treat it as 'any member of public can now access it'.
Even if a service doesn't have it in their TOS that they sell it to 3rd parties, they might do it anyway, or there will, sooner or later, be a breach of their poorly secured system.
To make it clear - I don't particularly blame any one corporation, this is a systemic issue of governments not having/not enforcing serious security measures. I just completely dropped the expectation of my information being private, and for the very few bits that I do actually want to stay private, I just don't, or allow anyone to, digitalize or reproduce them at all in any way.
It is a common misconception that facts are reported because they are surprising. Facts are reported because they are important. More and more governments are passing age verification laws which put exactly this data in to the hands of even more shady private companies. This breach serves as evidence that those laws are misguided, and spreading news of this event may help build public support for those efforts.
This is the essential point, and why it’s always a bit frustrating seeing ‘is anyone surprised’ take come up so often here. It lowers the quality of the possible discussion by trivialising it.
Reminds me of the Panama Papers, which exposed a huge international money laundering/tax evasion ring that no one seemed to care about because "everyone knows they're doing this stuff"
In the example you give there is no needed provision to store the id or all information in the document. Only extracting the date of birth, name and document number is sufficient.
Yes I know this a utopia and it won't happen.
Edit: afaik storing the photo is only needed in medical cases to alternatively asses having the correct person. Bit much for something simple as age verification.
Without going too much off-topic: In a vacuum, you are right. In reality, facts are reported because they sell.
It is a good day when important facts like this one happen to coincide with what people what to know more about. (the recent UK attempt at stripping the rights of its citizens)
Tomorrow, people will have forgotten all about it, and the government can continue to expand its powers without anyone talking about it.
> I don't particularly blame any one corporation, this is a systemic issue of governments not having/not enforcing serious security measures
Wrong, governments caused the issue because they demand customers to ID themselves. There exists not a single viable security measure aside from not collecting the data. Government is also not able to propose any security measures.
Unlikely that the data will ever be deleted now, no matter if Discord pays any ransoms or not.
No, governments caused the issue by demanding customers to ID themselves, while failing to provide the necessary tooling for doing so in a secure manor.
There's really only a few countries in the world who can provide the services needed to make this work. On top of my head, Estonia, Sweden and Denmark (there's probably others).
The companies in question could have a flag in every user data to confirm they are over the age limit.
At worse keep the birth date, since various aspect of a service can be available depending on age (and user can change locality / country, and therefore be subject to different law).
If you keep on top of it, you have at most 3 days of user's "ongoing verification" sensible data available for theft. Keeping more than that will always be an invitation to bad actors.
In the context of age limits, that is wrong. The German eID has a zero knowledge method of proving that your age is above a certain number without revealing anything else. That method has been around for like 15 years and these days, thanks to smartphones with NFC readers, is quite user-friendly.
In practice it's basically not used anywhere except for cigarette vending machines because it's much simpler to hire some dubious third party "wave your ID in front of your camera" service
Edit: mandatory age verification is still an atrocious idea for a number of other reasons, just to be clear
It's not surprising because there's never been a significant penalty for it, I guess because everybody just got completely used to massive breaches without much reaction. But then again it's very hard to get legislation passed that's not in the interests of big business.
ZK proofs for identity can't go mainstream quick enough. I agree with what you're saying completely. It's frustrating that we have the technology now to verify aspects of someone's identity without revealing it, but that it's going to take forever to become robust enough for mainstream use.
It's an interesting litmus test because regulators would not accept ZK age proofs unless the stated purpose of age verification laws (reduce harm to minors) is the _actual_ purpose of those laws.
Not some different unstated goal, such as ending online anonymity.
That does not work without treacherous locked-down hardware. The marketing by Google et al is leaving out that fact to privacy-wash what is ultimately a push for digital authoritarianism.
Think about it - the claim is that those systems can prove aspects of someone's identity (eg age), without the site where the proof is used obtaining any knowledge about the individual and without the proof provider knowing where the proof is used. If all of these things are true while users are running software they can control, then it's trivial for an activist to set up a proxy that takes requests for proofs from other users and generates proofs based on the activist's identity - with no downside for the activist, since this can never be traced back to them.
The only thing that could be done is for proof providers to limit the rate of proofs per identity so that multiple activists would be required to say provide access to Discord to all the kids who want it.
Anonymous proofs of age don't work, because (in theory) I could set up a server, plugged into my ID chip, that lets anyone download age proofs from me, and then anyone can be over 18. They don't just need to know someone is over 18 - they also need to know it's the same person using the website.
What's wild is that the burden keeps falling on individuals to be ultra-cautious, while the systems handling the data rarely face meaningful consequences
For years, I resisted TSA Pre check on principle, even though I was a frequent traveler. I finally relented when I realized there were places like Thailand that force you to give your biometrics, and almost certainly sell them back to shadowy US agencies.
> places like Thailand that force you to give your biometrics
You're being returned the favor! Anyone that's ever entered the US has had to do the same, and our prints are being stored in a DHS database.
Out of curiosity, did you not need to provide prints to get a passport in the first place? I can't image a single developed country without biometric passports.
I think you're assuming an ideal world where there's no information asymmetry, all the market participants receive and understand all the information and the risks, and clients could realistically move to an alternative platform that provably handles things better.
A big problem is that the Silicon Valley playbook drives companies like Discord to be winner take all. It’s hard to avoid using them, but then they require that give up sensitive documents. I shouldn’t have to choose between keeping sensitive documents private and being able to participate in most gaming communities. Some open source projects have also starting adopting Discord to manage their communities.
I told the 2 servers I hang in about a month ago that if I randomly disappear it’s because I can’t login without an ID and I’m simply not doing it/that they should consider the post my preemptive “goodbye.” I included where to contact me for those who want to. Frankly I think anyone on discord should do the same
> "or there will, sooner or later, be a breach of their poorly secured system."
It doesn't even need to be poorly secured. The oldest form of hacking is social engineering. If a company is storing valuable enough information, all one needs to do is compel the lowest common denominator with access to it to intentionally or inadvertently provide access.
You can try to create all the sort loopholes and redundancies but in general the reality is that no system is ever going to be truly secure. Another reality is that many of the people with the greatest level of access will not be technical by nature. For instance apparently the DNC hacks were carried out by a textbook phishing email - 'You've like totally been hacked, click on this anonymizer link to leads to Goog1e.com so we can confirm your identity.'
I blame companies (including discord) for collecting as much information as they can instead of as little as possible. More data collected -> more data that will eventually get sold / leaked / hacked.
I very much do blame the corporations and governments that push for these kinds of policies in some way or another.
We see things like this, which happen about as often as fucking rainfall in a mountain forest, and then also see the ever increasing push towards ID verification by corporations and government organizations that pinkie-promise to secure or not retain any of the personal data you were wrist-burned into handing over to them.
What a toxic mix of garbage that becomes. The result is crap like the above, making the internet ever worse and basic personal data security (to not even speak of lofty things like digital privacy and using the internet anonymously) pretty much null and void even if you really do try to take the right steps.
If “serious security measures” involves anything to that 2fa authentication that any normal person hates with a passion then you can forget about it.
The real, long term answer to all this consists in having less of our lives in digital presence, that even means less digital government thingies and, yes, less payments and other money-related issues being handled online.
Honestly I don't understand why so many things are tied to one secret _that you have to share with others_ all the time.
Why is there no rotation possible? Why is there no API to issue a new secret and mark the previous one as leaked? Why is there no way to have a temporary validation code for travels, which gets auto revoked once the citizens are back in their home country?
It's like governments don't understand what identity actually means, and always confuse it with publicity of secrets.
I mean, more modern digital passports now have a public and private key. But they put the private key on the card, which essentially is an absolute anti pattern and makes the key infrastructure just as pointless.
If you as a government agency have a system in place that does not accommodate for the use case that passports are stolen all the time, you must be utterly out of touch with reality.
Governments don't get a damn thing about the internet. They just want to govern, and justify the spending.
Their goal is not to build resilient systems — it iss to preserve control. The internet was born decentralised, while governments operate through centralised hierarchies. Every system they design ends up reflecting that mindset: central authority, rigid bureaucracy, zero trust in the user.
So instead of adopting key rotation, temporary credentials, or privacy-first mechanisms, they recreate 1950s paperwork in digital form and call it innovation.
Same. I automatically assume that all information I send to any organisation will end up on the Internet sooner or later be it by accident or sold to some shady third party.
> I basically treat it as 'any member of public can now access it'.
Still remember the conversation over "mega apps"?
Based on my experience with Alipay, which was a Chinese financial focused mega app but now more like a platform of everything plus money, the idea of treating every bit information you uploaded online as public info is laughable.
Back when Alipay was really just a financial app, it make sense for it to collect private information, facial data, government issued ID etc. But now as a mega app, the "smaller app" running inside it can also request permission to read these private information if they wanted to, and since most users are idiots don't know how to read, they will just click whatever you want them to click (it really work like this, magic!).
Alipay of course pretends to have protection in place, but we all know why it's there: just to make it legally look like it's the user's fault if something went wrong -- it's not even very delicate or complex. Kinda like what the idea "(you should) treat it (things uploaded online) as 'any member of public can now access'" tries to do, blame the user, punch down, easy done.
But fundamentally, the information was provided and used in different context, user provided the information without knowing exactly how the information will be used in the future. It's a Bait-and-switch, just that simple.
Of course, Discord isn't Alipay, but that's just because they're not a mega app, yet. A much healthier mentality is ask those companies to NOT to collect these data, or refuse to use their products. For example, I've not ever uploaded my government ID photos to Discord, if some feature requires it, I just don't use that feature.
Couldn't agree more, save for your last sentence. How do you avoid that? We need to provide o
Digital papers to a number of different people for proper handling
> this is a systemic issue of governments not having/not enforcing serious security measures.
To do so seems impractical. Imagine the government machinery that would be required to audit all companies and organizations and services to which someone can upload PII.
The systemic solution wouldn’t be to do that. It would be to both remove their own requirements that organisations collect this data, and to penalise organisations for collecting it outside of a handful of already heavily regulated industries like banking.
> I just completely dropped the expectation of my information being private
There are all the reasons in the world to feel that way. The scary thing (says troyvit as he passes out the tinfoil hats) is that privacy laws are all about an "expectation of privacy." In other words we all expect privacy when we're in our bathrooms, so government surveillance in the bathroom is hard to justify. Now that there are cameras in supermarket checkouts, and we all expect them, legally that's no longer a privacy concern and we can't claim that our privacy is being unreasonably infringed.
And what you're saying is that now we've reached the stage in history where through incompetence and greed we shouldn't expect any privacy anyway, and that opens the door for all kinds of surveillance because our expectations have fallen so low. I'm not a lawyer btw so take it all with a grain of salt.
You really think governments could write rules that would help this?
The only rule I can imagine is big penalties for data being breached, no matter the cause, but do we actually think it's a multi million dollar problem for 70k photos to be released? Hard problem.
It’s surprising that it happened to a big name like Discord in this day and age. Huge data breaches of large tech companies are becoming increasingly rare as security in general is getting better.
If I want the ID of a bunch of Discord users, I don't go after Discord directly, I find some bot that the targeted users have on their discord servers, or third party service that Discord uses themselves. Then I find some individual person with access to those things, and I harass and/or threaten that person until they give me what I want to make me go away. If I think they might be crooked, I might just offer them a cut of the take. I'm probably not paying them though, not unless I think I can leverage them against other targets and need to keep them around.
Either way, an individual person isn't going to be able to hold off a coordinated attack for very long, and law enforcement generally doesn't give a shit about internet randoms attacking individual people.
One important problem that's mostly ignored is the lack of transparency about the third-party providers handling such sensitive ID documents. When a breach occurs, public statements rarely name the exact vendor responsible, making it difficult for affected users to understand who actually had access and who might still have their data. This opacity delays accountability and creates ongoing risks, since users have no meaningful way to audit or assess the practices of these shadow providers. Unless this layer of the data-handling ecosystem is discussed and regulated, future breaches will remain inevitable and largely untraceable.
The third-party layer is basically the dark matter of data breaches like invisible to users, barely acknowledged by companies, and completely unaccountable when things go wrong
Discord uses Zendesk (1). However in the press release they don't name the third party that was compromised, and Zendesk denies that it was their service.
What other third party was Discord using if not Zendesk? Who's reputation are they protecting?
Companies usually promise that the ID would be used only for validation and then immediately deleted. How so many IDs could leak then? They verify millions of IDs per month?
I can still swipe the message away, so I haven't done it yet. I'm going to work out how I can fake the face scan. I ain't sending Government ID to some chat app (no matter how big or small) that's over the top.
As an aside, I would have thought the age groups should be: 13 to 18, and 18+. They're the only ones that materially matter to the reason this check exists, in Australia at least. I don't want to contribute to their demographic analysis.
When the australia sub reddit was discussing the introduction of id on discord, the top comment was something along the lines of "look up openfeint". That was the day I uninstalled discord. It may not be an easy decision, especially if you are part of important social communities, but we cannot accept this level of disregard for our identities.
The unauthorized party also accessed a “small number” of images of government IDs from “users who had appealed an age determination.”
It makes sense they have to hang on to the ID in case of processing an appeal, which probably doesn't have the highest priority and hence stretches out in time.
The funny thing about this is that it kinda makes it OK for Discord to still have the records. But...
1. Discord still got hacked despite being a company that must have passed some level of authorised audit in order to be able to store government ID cards. (who audits the auditors? Is there an independent rating of security audit companies? What was the vulnerability? Was there any Government due diligence?)
2. This is a great example of why "something else" is needed for proof of identity transactions over the wire, and this "something else" should exist, and have existed for long enough to develop a level of trust, before Governments start mandating that private companies audited by other private companies must undertake actions that require the storage of Government ID documents. Banking level security and regulation should be required for any aggregator of such sensitive data. That fucking Discord had Government ID docs at all is beyond ridiculous. More-so for Governments of countries other than where Discord was incorporated. A state-sponsored Russian / Chinese / North Korean / Iranian / <other> Discord-alternative would have been an interesting situation. The implicit trust in Discord, and any other "app publisher" requiring ID confirmation is just peculiar.
Do they actually say in the TOS that they will delete them? If they do, do they say immediately? How immediately? Right away or, perhaps, 1 month? Unless specified in contractual documentation, words like "immediately" or "soon" do not have any single definition, which allows them to stretch it without technically being in breach of contract. Not to mention that often times, governments mandate data retention for so-and-so amount of time, so the companies are legally required in such cases to keep the data even if they, miraculously, desire not to.
Or it's all kosher as per their "internal policy" which translates to "yes, it was deleted on the server where you first uploaded it" but "pre-deletion" it was "transitioned" to "another secure server" for "your convenience" and "everything is as per our T&C that you agreed to and we follow the highest standards of data security and safety. Thank you for your time".
If Kafka were alive today, he'd see the world has outdone itself.
From what I understand, these were IDs submitted to the third-party for support cases where the user was disputing the verification process. Whether these leaked IDs were from open tickets or not should be the question, if my understanding of the situation is correct.
I guess they are required to store everything for years for "compliance". How else are they are going to save their butts when someone manages to fake their identity through them?
The regulation lets identity verification companies store identity data for up to three years. The providers typically do it to train machine learning models for fraud detection.
The fact the deletion is at all needed speaks for a pretty terrible design. The data should simply not be permanently stored.
I have quite a lot of experience dealing with personal identity information. Unless the latter has to be reported then it's never stored. Along with the fact it's actually deleted to comply with GDPR and friends (when it has to be recorded). In any case if any personal data is to be stored, it's always encrypted with personal keys.
Or maybe they define 'delete' as moving data from "production" env to "deleted" env and if someone asked that data to be deleted even from there then the next step is moving from "deleted" to "purged".
The whole "it wasn't us, it was our third-party vendor" line is getting way too common. If you're collecting government IDs for age verification, the security bar should be extremely high... no matter who's handling the data
ID checks, driven by prudishness, are an absolute gift to the big social media companies. They're the only entities whom (a) already know the check's answers, and (b) have the resources to keep hackers largely at bay.
I am not surprised these laws are landing with such little resistence.
It is specifically because you got banned for "being under 13" it comes from someone asking a question like "How many candles in this photo?" then you reply "7" then they edit the message to say "How old are you" and voila, underage ban.
What you are overlooking is that Discord is the new MSN Messenger, YIM, etc your friends are not backed up in a meaningful way, nor the servers you're in, if you lose your account, you lose contact with basically your entire internet life and friends.
Discord should not keep those IDs longer than a month at a time once the user is unbanned it should be deleted a week later, or removed from that panel altogether.
The issue then becomes "well why don't they just go back to a Teamspeak server? they can self host it!"
But we're forgetting there that the average person online is not a dev. The most they usually know is how to point and click on something. Which also means they usually don't know how to spin up a Linux machine/VM somewhere and install their own chat server.
Discord is popular because it lets almost anyone on Earth point and click to create a chat "server". If someone can figure out how to do that (eg cPanel), you can absolutely break their moat.
A bunch of UK users are blocked from the more "free speech" (over 13) channels unless they prove their identity to Discord, to comply with the Online Safety Act.
What would you say of a lot of FOSS companies/orgs who love to stay on places like Discord? Hell, some entities that pride themselves on "privacy" and "E2EE" shit are specifically on Discord. I think that must go beyond moronity.
Are you seriously blaming kids and teenagers (who spend their free time on Discord) because they are not smart enough to know better and form communities elsewhere?
You can do better than victim blame, and instead point the finger at Discord and whoever told the British government that delegating ID control to third-parties was a good idea.
No need to blame the user for the companies actions.
Company enacts policy enforced on them by law, for example requiring proof that a user is above the age of 18 to be able to use a channel where other users may use naughty words (The Horror!!!).
User struggles to use the automated age check system (I used the "guess age by letting an AI have a look at a selfie" method and it was a pain in the ass which failed twice before it finally worked) so does what is recommended and make a support ticket. [0]
User, relying on the published policy that Discord will delete ID directly after being used to to the age check [1] decides they wish to remain to have communication with their online friends uploads their ID.
Discord then fail to honour their end of the deal by deleting their users documents after use, and then get breached.
Full blame is on Discord for poorly handling their users data by their 3rd parties, and on the Governments forcing such practices. Discord should have their asses handed to them by the UK's ICO.
Sure, us geeks can and will use self hosted systems and find ways to avoid doing ID checks, but your avg joe isn't going to do that.
Hopefully cases like this will help with the push back on governments mandating these kind of checks, but I see the UK government just falling back to "think of the children" and laying all the blame on Discord, (who are not without fault in this case).
> Discord then fail to honour their end of the deal by deleting their users documents after use, and then get breached.
This wasn't documents uploaded via the automated ID checker, it was users manually sending ID documents to support in order to appeal an automated age decision.
> User, relying on the published policy that Discord will delete ID directly after being used to to the age check [1] decides they wish to remain to have communication with their online friends uploads their ID.
This is the part where the user has to take at least partial blame. You have to be utterly stupid (or at the very least way too sheltered) to believe a statement like this from a company, especially when there are zero consequences to the company for lying about it or negligently failing to live up to their policy.
At this point a whole bunch of crypto exchanges including chinese ones have my driver's license, passport and more. It is what it is, any real KYC process will require video identification anyway.
Don't worry, the only thing governments will learn from this is that they need to exert even more control. They'll use this as a convenient excuse to centralize the age verification in the interest of security, which conveniently gives the government the final say over which web services you're allowed to use.
The stricter the dictatorship is, the more likely people will resist the regime.
That's why many of the traditional totalitarian regimes are populistic, they do what their people want them to do or what they can convince them is good for them. New Western hybrid regimes still didn't realize they can't rule against their own people forever.
Readit News
Even if a service doesn't have it in their TOS that they sell it to 3rd parties, they might do it anyway, or there will, sooner or later, be a breach of their poorly secured system.
To make it clear - I don't particularly blame any one corporation, this is a systemic issue of governments not having/not enforcing serious security measures. I just completely dropped the expectation of my information being private, and for the very few bits that I do actually want to stay private, I just don't, or allow anyone to, digitalize or reproduce them at all in any way.
Yes I know this a utopia and it won't happen.
Edit: afaik storing the photo is only needed in medical cases to alternatively asses having the correct person. Bit much for something simple as age verification.
It's my take as well, frankly.
Without going too much off-topic: In a vacuum, you are right. In reality, facts are reported because they sell.
It is a good day when important facts like this one happen to coincide with what people what to know more about. (the recent UK attempt at stripping the rights of its citizens)
Tomorrow, people will have forgotten all about it, and the government can continue to expand its powers without anyone talking about it.
Wrong, governments caused the issue because they demand customers to ID themselves. There exists not a single viable security measure aside from not collecting the data. Government is also not able to propose any security measures.
Unlikely that the data will ever be deleted now, no matter if Discord pays any ransoms or not.
There's really only a few countries in the world who can provide the services needed to make this work. On top of my head, Estonia, Sweden and Denmark (there's probably others).
At worse keep the birth date, since various aspect of a service can be available depending on age (and user can change locality / country, and therefore be subject to different law).
If you keep on top of it, you have at most 3 days of user's "ongoing verification" sensible data available for theft. Keeping more than that will always be an invitation to bad actors.
In practice it's basically not used anywhere except for cigarette vending machines because it's much simpler to hire some dubious third party "wave your ID in front of your camera" service
Edit: mandatory age verification is still an atrocious idea for a number of other reasons, just to be clear
Dead Comment
Not some different unstated goal, such as ending online anonymity.
Think about it - the claim is that those systems can prove aspects of someone's identity (eg age), without the site where the proof is used obtaining any knowledge about the individual and without the proof provider knowing where the proof is used. If all of these things are true while users are running software they can control, then it's trivial for an activist to set up a proxy that takes requests for proofs from other users and generates proofs based on the activist's identity - with no downside for the activist, since this can never be traced back to them.
The only thing that could be done is for proof providers to limit the rate of proofs per identity so that multiple activists would be required to say provide access to Discord to all the kids who want it.
This is an example why that was a bad idea in the first place. No damage control for bad solutions will change that.
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3300568/thai...
You're being returned the favor! Anyone that's ever entered the US has had to do the same, and our prints are being stored in a DHS database.
Out of curiosity, did you not need to provide prints to get a passport in the first place? I can't image a single developed country without biometric passports.
(I don't really want to call out specific comments)
So I'm sure this article may be surprising to them.
It doesn't even need to be poorly secured. The oldest form of hacking is social engineering. If a company is storing valuable enough information, all one needs to do is compel the lowest common denominator with access to it to intentionally or inadvertently provide access.
You can try to create all the sort loopholes and redundancies but in general the reality is that no system is ever going to be truly secure. Another reality is that many of the people with the greatest level of access will not be technical by nature. For instance apparently the DNC hacks were carried out by a textbook phishing email - 'You've like totally been hacked, click on this anonymizer link to leads to Goog1e.com so we can confirm your identity.'
We see things like this, which happen about as often as fucking rainfall in a mountain forest, and then also see the ever increasing push towards ID verification by corporations and government organizations that pinkie-promise to secure or not retain any of the personal data you were wrist-burned into handing over to them.
What a toxic mix of garbage that becomes. The result is crap like the above, making the internet ever worse and basic personal data security (to not even speak of lofty things like digital privacy and using the internet anonymously) pretty much null and void even if you really do try to take the right steps.
71% want age verification
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/31/81-of-us-...
How that's done is the issue but you can't blame the government and corporations from making it happen.
Is it this, or is it a "systemic issue of governments not minding their own damn business"???
The real, long term answer to all this consists in having less of our lives in digital presence, that even means less digital government thingies and, yes, less payments and other money-related issues being handled online.
Why is there no rotation possible? Why is there no API to issue a new secret and mark the previous one as leaked? Why is there no way to have a temporary validation code for travels, which gets auto revoked once the citizens are back in their home country?
It's like governments don't understand what identity actually means, and always confuse it with publicity of secrets.
I mean, more modern digital passports now have a public and private key. But they put the private key on the card, which essentially is an absolute anti pattern and makes the key infrastructure just as pointless.
If you as a government agency have a system in place that does not accommodate for the use case that passports are stolen all the time, you must be utterly out of touch with reality.
Their goal is not to build resilient systems — it iss to preserve control. The internet was born decentralised, while governments operate through centralised hierarchies. Every system they design ends up reflecting that mindset: central authority, rigid bureaucracy, zero trust in the user.
So instead of adopting key rotation, temporary credentials, or privacy-first mechanisms, they recreate 1950s paperwork in digital form and call it innovation.
If you upload anything to the internet, it's public. Even the passwords you type are potentially public.
Still remember the conversation over "mega apps"?
Based on my experience with Alipay, which was a Chinese financial focused mega app but now more like a platform of everything plus money, the idea of treating every bit information you uploaded online as public info is laughable.
Back when Alipay was really just a financial app, it make sense for it to collect private information, facial data, government issued ID etc. But now as a mega app, the "smaller app" running inside it can also request permission to read these private information if they wanted to, and since most users are idiots don't know how to read, they will just click whatever you want them to click (it really work like this, magic!).
Alipay of course pretends to have protection in place, but we all know why it's there: just to make it legally look like it's the user's fault if something went wrong -- it's not even very delicate or complex. Kinda like what the idea "(you should) treat it (things uploaded online) as 'any member of public can now access'" tries to do, blame the user, punch down, easy done.
But fundamentally, the information was provided and used in different context, user provided the information without knowing exactly how the information will be used in the future. It's a Bait-and-switch, just that simple.
Of course, Discord isn't Alipay, but that's just because they're not a mega app, yet. A much healthier mentality is ask those companies to NOT to collect these data, or refuse to use their products. For example, I've not ever uploaded my government ID photos to Discord, if some feature requires it, I just don't use that feature.
To do so seems impractical. Imagine the government machinery that would be required to audit all companies and organizations and services to which someone can upload PII.
Not tractable.
There are all the reasons in the world to feel that way. The scary thing (says troyvit as he passes out the tinfoil hats) is that privacy laws are all about an "expectation of privacy." In other words we all expect privacy when we're in our bathrooms, so government surveillance in the bathroom is hard to justify. Now that there are cameras in supermarket checkouts, and we all expect them, legally that's no longer a privacy concern and we can't claim that our privacy is being unreasonably infringed.
And what you're saying is that now we've reached the stage in history where through incompetence and greed we shouldn't expect any privacy anyway, and that opens the door for all kinds of surveillance because our expectations have fallen so low. I'm not a lawyer btw so take it all with a grain of salt.
The only rule I can imagine is big penalties for data being breached, no matter the cause, but do we actually think it's a multi million dollar problem for 70k photos to be released? Hard problem.
If I want the ID of a bunch of Discord users, I don't go after Discord directly, I find some bot that the targeted users have on their discord servers, or third party service that Discord uses themselves. Then I find some individual person with access to those things, and I harass and/or threaten that person until they give me what I want to make me go away. If I think they might be crooked, I might just offer them a cut of the take. I'm probably not paying them though, not unless I think I can leverage them against other targets and need to keep them around.
Either way, an individual person isn't going to be able to hold off a coordinated attack for very long, and law enforcement generally doesn't give a shit about internet randoms attacking individual people.
Citation needed. /s
cough Microsoft cough
What other third party was Discord using if not Zendesk? Who's reputation are they protecting?
[1] https://www.zendesk.fr/customer/discord/
This might even be a PR move. They fucked up and can merely say "a third party" did it. Who's gonna verify this?
Unless we have whistleblowers we will never know. What a disgrace.
Kinda feels like Discord is lying by omission.
Edit: Actually my bet is their support staff just sold them out.
> they were able to compromise Discord Zendesk by compromising a "BPO Agent" (outsourced support).
> Of course, as is tradition, it is also entirely possible they're lying
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The information you provide is only used to confirm your age group, then it's deleted
Refer screenshot: https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/1nkrxcp/discord...
I can still swipe the message away, so I haven't done it yet. I'm going to work out how I can fake the face scan. I ain't sending Government ID to some chat app (no matter how big or small) that's over the top.
As an aside, I would have thought the age groups should be: 13 to 18, and 18+. They're the only ones that materially matter to the reason this check exists, in Australia at least. I don't want to contribute to their demographic analysis.
It was Discord's helpdesk software (reported to be Zendesk).
If you have problems with that system, you can log a support ticket with the Discord helpdesk, attaching your ID, and they can override it for you.
The unauthorized party also accessed a “small number” of images of government IDs from “users who had appealed an age determination.”
It makes sense they have to hang on to the ID in case of processing an appeal, which probably doesn't have the highest priority and hence stretches out in time.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/news/792032/discord-customer-servic...
1. Discord still got hacked despite being a company that must have passed some level of authorised audit in order to be able to store government ID cards. (who audits the auditors? Is there an independent rating of security audit companies? What was the vulnerability? Was there any Government due diligence?)
2. This is a great example of why "something else" is needed for proof of identity transactions over the wire, and this "something else" should exist, and have existed for long enough to develop a level of trust, before Governments start mandating that private companies audited by other private companies must undertake actions that require the storage of Government ID documents. Banking level security and regulation should be required for any aggregator of such sensitive data. That fucking Discord had Government ID docs at all is beyond ridiculous. More-so for Governments of countries other than where Discord was incorporated. A state-sponsored Russian / Chinese / North Korean / Iranian / <other> Discord-alternative would have been an interesting situation. The implicit trust in Discord, and any other "app publisher" requiring ID confirmation is just peculiar.
If Kafka were alive today, he'd see the world has outdone itself.
And even if lying is illegal in a particular context, it's de-facto legal since nobody ever gets punished for it.
I have quite a lot of experience dealing with personal identity information. Unless the latter has to be reported then it's never stored. Along with the fact it's actually deleted to comply with GDPR and friends (when it has to be recorded). In any case if any personal data is to be stored, it's always encrypted with personal keys.
I am not surprised these laws are landing with such little resistence.
What you are overlooking is that Discord is the new MSN Messenger, YIM, etc your friends are not backed up in a meaningful way, nor the servers you're in, if you lose your account, you lose contact with basically your entire internet life and friends.
Discord should not keep those IDs longer than a month at a time once the user is unbanned it should be deleted a week later, or removed from that panel altogether.
> You've got to be a complete moron uploading your gov ID to discord
^ Still stands.
But we're forgetting there that the average person online is not a dev. The most they usually know is how to point and click on something. Which also means they usually don't know how to spin up a Linux machine/VM somewhere and install their own chat server.
Discord is popular because it lets almost anyone on Earth point and click to create a chat "server". If someone can figure out how to do that (eg cPanel), you can absolutely break their moat.
You can do better than victim blame, and instead point the finger at Discord and whoever told the British government that delegating ID control to third-parties was a good idea.
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Company enacts policy enforced on them by law, for example requiring proof that a user is above the age of 18 to be able to use a channel where other users may use naughty words (The Horror!!!).
User struggles to use the automated age check system (I used the "guess age by letting an AI have a look at a selfie" method and it was a pain in the ass which failed twice before it finally worked) so does what is recommended and make a support ticket. [0]
User, relying on the published policy that Discord will delete ID directly after being used to to the age check [1] decides they wish to remain to have communication with their online friends uploads their ID.
Discord then fail to honour their end of the deal by deleting their users documents after use, and then get breached.
Full blame is on Discord for poorly handling their users data by their 3rd parties, and on the Governments forcing such practices. Discord should have their asses handed to them by the UK's ICO.
Sure, us geeks can and will use self hosted systems and find ways to avoid doing ID checks, but your avg joe isn't going to do that.
Hopefully cases like this will help with the push back on governments mandating these kind of checks, but I see the UK government just falling back to "think of the children" and laying all the blame on Discord, (who are not without fault in this case).
[0] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/30326565624343...
[1] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/30326565624343...
This wasn't documents uploaded via the automated ID checker, it was users manually sending ID documents to support in order to appeal an automated age decision.
This is the part where the user has to take at least partial blame. You have to be utterly stupid (or at the very least way too sheltered) to believe a statement like this from a company, especially when there are zero consequences to the company for lying about it or negligently failing to live up to their policy.
I hope this incident and future data breaches will finally raise awareness of which direction many regimes are going.
That's why many of the traditional totalitarian regimes are populistic, they do what their people want them to do or what they can convince them is good for them. New Western hybrid regimes still didn't realize they can't rule against their own people forever.