There's a particular flavor of corporate announcement that reads like a hostage negotiation with your own user base. Discord dropped one this week, and it had all the hallmarks: reassuring language about safety, a sprinkling of "we care about your experience," and buried somewhere in the middle, the part where they ask for your age or your government-issued documents. Please.

Starting next month, Discord will require all users worldwide to prove they're adults or get locked into a "teen-appropriate experience by default." If the platform's inference model can't figure out your age from your account history and activity patterns, you'll have two choices: let AI estimate your age from a video selfie, or hand over a photo of your passport or driver's license to a third-party vendor.

We've seen this movie before. The ending was bad.

Here's what makes the timing so exquisitely painful. In October 2025, Discord disclosed that one of its third-party vendors suffered a data breach. Attackers stole real names, email addresses, billing information, customer support messages, and IP addresses. But the worst part? Government document images. Passports. Driver's licenses. The exact kind of sensitive material Discord is now asking more users to submit.

Discord says it stopped working with that vendor. Discord says it's using a different vendor now. Discord says the images get deleted quickly, in most cases immediately after confirmation.

Cool. We've heard this before, too!

The breach happened through Zendesk, Discord's customer support partner, because a group of attackers used social engineering to get access. They didn't need sophisticated hacking tools. They talked their way in. And now Discord is asking users to trust a different third-party vendor with even more sensitive data, at even greater scale.

Read the comments on The Verge's coverage and you'll see what Discord users actually think about this plan. Multiple users reported canceling their Nitro subscriptions on the spot. Others announced plans to shut down the communities they moderate. One user pointed out the absurdity that their account is nearly a decade old and they pay with an adult credit card, but Discord still wants to see their papers.

The backlash is loud, and it's coming from Discord's most loyal users. The people who pay monthly subscriptions. The people who run servers. The people who make the platform worth using in the first place.

The real problem with "papers, please" verification

Age verification matters. Keeping young people safe online matters. Nobody serious is arguing otherwise.

But the approach matters too. And what Discord is rolling out reflects a deeply flawed assumption that's spreading across the internet: that the only way to prove something about yourself online is to hand over your most sensitive personal documents to companies that have repeatedly demonstrated they can't protect them.

Think about what a government document actually contains. Your full legal name. Your date of birth. Your photo. Your address. A unique number that connects to your entire civic existence. When you upload that to verify your age on a chat platform, you're handing over orders of magnitude more information than the situation requires. It's like showing your entire medical file to prove you had a flu shot.

And these documents don't live in a vault. They travel through APIs, get processed by third-party vendors, sit in databases that become targets. Even when companies say they delete them immediately, "immediately" is a word that does a lot of heavy lifting in corporate security disclosures. The October breach proved that.

The European Union seems to understand this. The EU Digital Identity Wallet, due for full rollout this year, is designed to give a simple yes-or-no answer to age verification questions without the platform ever storing your data. It's decentralized, locally stored, and purpose-built for exactly this kind of interaction. One commenter on The Verge's piece called it "the only digital system I will trust."

There's a better question to ask

The fundamental question Discord is trying to answer is simple: is this person a real human adult? But the solution they've landed on answers a completely different question: who is this person, specifically, down to their government-recorded details?

Those are wildly different questions. And the gap between them is where all the privacy risk lives.

You can prove you're a real, unique human without revealing who you are. The technology exists. Verification approaches that use encrypted face embeddings, for example, can confirm liveness and uniqueness without ever storing a recognizable image, collecting a name, or knowing anything about your offline existence. You verify once, the proof lives on your device, and platforms receive only the confirmation they actually need: yes, this is a real person. That's it.

This matters because the alternative we're building toward is an internet where every platform has a copy of your most sensitive documents, protected by whatever third-party vendor offered the best contract terms that quarter. An internet where every data breach doesn't just expose your email and a hashed password, it exposes the literal keys to your civic existence.

We're building something different at VerifyYou. Our approach proves humanness without collecting any personal information. No names, no documents, no data sitting on servers waiting for the next breach. Platforms get the answer they need. Users keep everything else.

What Discord users actually want

Read those comments again. The frustration isn't about age verification itself. People understand why platforms need to know if someone is an adult. The frustration is about being asked to hand over their most sensitive personal information to a company that already let it get stolen once.

Users want to be treated like adults. They want verification that respects them. They want to prove they're real without making themselves vulnerable.

That shouldn't be a radical ask.

The internet is heading toward a future where proving you're human becomes as routine as logging in. The only question is whether we build that future around handing out copies of our most sensitive documents to every platform that asks, or around verification that gives platforms what they need while letting people keep what's theirs.

Discord had a chance to lead on this. Instead, they chose "papers, please."

The rest of us can choose differently.