Data dump confirms dad's suspicions that Discord knew teen's age prior to hack.

"Brady Frey did not realize that his daughter lied about her age when she set up her Discord account. He only found out after her account got hacked and he got trapped in a spiraling support nightmare while trying to stop the hacker from targeting dozens of her young friends with financial extortion scams.

When Frey’s daughter signed up for Discord, she was 12 and technically not old enough to have an account. But like many kids who, regulators have found, commonly lie about their age to access social media platforms, she didn’t want to wait another year to join her friends on the messaging app. Hiding her age, she created an account that listed her as over 18 years old.

Now 13, the teen had been happily using the app for months when she suddenly got locked out of her account after clicking on a link from an attacker posing as Discord support. Since she didn’t enable two-factor authentication, the attacker was able to commandeer the account. Frey only found out what was happening when the attacker asked the teen to share her parents’ banking information if she wanted to get her account back.

Once Frey realized his daughter had been hacked, he assumed that Discord would promptly intervene, recognizing that many minor victims on her friends list could be harmed the longer the attacker kept control. Instead, Discord’s chatbot, Clyde, and a seeming human support member, Nelly, automatically closed her support tickets after telling her it would be best to report the issue from inside the app, which she could not access.

Frey told Ars he was shocked to see a platform as big as Discord relying on such poor support infrastructure.

“There’s no pathway for a parent to step in and advocate for a minor whose account has been compromised,” Frey told Ars."

Everyone laugh at Discord AI moderation

    • zo0 ( zo0@programming.dev ) English
      14·
      7 months ago

      Yeah I still don’t understand what her age has to do anything with the situation. What exactly would be the difference if she was 60?

      • frongt ( frongt@lemmy.zip ) English
        4·
        7 months ago

        It doesn’t have anything to do with it that I see.

        If anything, I would have expected them to ban the account even harder for admitting to being underage.

    • MagnificentSteiner ( MagnificentSteiner@lemmy.zip ) English
      8·
      7 months ago

      Try reading the article next time

      Since his daughter set up the account with an 18+ setting, it’s possible that the field corresponded to her self-reported age. But Frey could see that Discord updated the setting twice: once two days after the hack, and again after her account was restored. Each time, she was marked as not underage, despite support forum messages that repeatedly informed Discord she was 13.

      Seemingly, that meant that the platform could create “a detailed behavioral ad profile” on the teen, even though its internal system had categorized her in the 13–17 age group, Frey said.

      Samantha Baldwin, a policy and research staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told Ars that Discord’s hesitancy to formally update the age setting is telling. Frey’s case shows why privacy advocates believe that age verification laws aren’t about “protecting children” but about “surveillance and censorship,” she said.

      “That they would not recategorize a minor’s account demonstrates this clearly,” Baldwin said. “Discord is in the business of making money by selling their users’ personal data. They are implementing ‘age verification’ to meet regulatory compliance and to collect more data about their customers, not protect children.”

      EFF has long warned against age-gating the Internet, opposing the mass collection of IDs that might block users from accessing platforms and viewing age estimation technology as ineffective and privacy-invasive.