NEW YORK — Everyone keeps pretending Age Verification is about protecting kids, but a story out of The Rage makes it painfully clear what’s really being built. Discord flirted with an age-verification system powered by a startup called Persona, and what was marketed as a simple “prove you’re old enough” check turned out to be a sprawling surveillance apparatus. We’re not talking about glancing at a birthday. We’re talking about face scans, ID checks, device fingerprints, and a backend that quietly decides whether you’re a “risk” based on hundreds of signals you never agreed to think about.
The really elegant part, if you admire nightmares, is how normalized this has all become. In the name of compliance, companies are constructing permanent identity dossiers that can follow you long after you’ve logged off. According to the reporting, Persona’s systems weren’t just verifying age, they were running people through hundreds of checks and keeping the data for years. That’s not a bouncer at the door. That’s a private intelligence agency with Terms of Service instead of warrants.
Discord has since backed away, as corporations often do once the curtain gets pulled back, but the damage is already done. The blueprint exists, the incentives are clear, and lawmakers keep demanding “solutions” without asking who gets to hold the keys. Age verification is the friendly label slapped on something much bigger: a future where anonymity is treated as suspicious and access comes at the cost of being cataloged. You can read the original reporting here and decide how comfortable you are with that tradeoff:
https://www.therage.co/persona-age-verification/
