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.
SequoiaHope 7 hours ago [-]
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.
boriskourt 6 hours ago [-]
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.
franga2000 1 hours ago [-]
"Is anyone surprised" is an important question to ask, although in this case it would be more valuable to ask on a less techy forum. I'm not surprised and many people here are not surprised, but most people are still surprised when they hear something like this, which is why they gladly give their information to anyone that asks. If the majority of Discord users knew breaches are inevitable and refused to give their information or at least took some protective measures like partial redaction and use-case watermarking, this breach would be less of an issue and/or such breaches would be less common.
We need to make sure nobody is surprised. Everyone should rewrite every "upload" button in their head to say "publish".
monooso 1 hours ago [-]
It's a valid question, which speaks to the frequency with which these things happen. That's isn't trivialising the problem.
nomilk 3 hours ago [-]
Wonder if this will cause a surge in demand for fake IDs that are sufficient for age-verification but harmless if leaked.
Telemakhos 13 minutes ago [-]
It might give momentum to age-verification schemes like Apple Wallet [0]. Apple gets the state ID in wallet and exposes an age verification API to apps like Discord; Discord queries the API and relies on Apple's age verification without ever getting access to the personally-identifying information.
Heck, i would like a fake name, social security number, and birthdate as well while I am at it
bell-cot 45 minutes ago [-]
Might that be a business model for an enterprising Secretary of State? They carefully verify your real ID, the fake ID's trivially tie back to that if the cops ask (not so useful for committing crimes), there are upcharges for multiple fake ID's, or tweaked ages / weights / photos. More upcharges for "vanity" names...
"Really, your honor, it's hardly different from an author getting a DBA or LLC for his pen name."
consp 6 hours ago [-]
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.
mcintyre1994 5 hours ago [-]
This breach is them being irresponsible with customer support software. In the case of automated age verification, the providers say that nothing identifiable gets stored and they might be lying but it’s feasible that you could run that service the way they say they do.
This breach is about the manual alternative to that, where you can appeal to Discord customer support if the automated thing says you’re not the right age. They seem to do that in part by having you send a picture of your ID.
I’m sure in their database they’re then just storing the date of birth etc, but then they obviously just don’t bother deleting the private image from the customer service software.
DrewADesign 4 hours ago [-]
Sounds like a great use case for an automated ML cleanup/reporting feature. Maybe as a daemon as a bolt-on fix, or integrated as a feature into the support software itself.
kmbfjr 3 hours ago [-]
Add in blockchain and we’ll be all set.
jasonjayr 2 hours ago [-]
Even then, for age verification, just verify the ID, record + sign the verification, and DESTROY THE DATA! Don't retain the original document "just in case", or even the birthday or name.
ajsnigrutin 1 hours ago [-]
But why? I mean... this data might be valueable at some time, if nothing else, when the company is sold to some other data-gathering company... and the punishment for such a breach will be less than the data is worth.
I mean.. if the governments did their jobs and multipled the punishment for a single breach by 70.000 (in this case) and cause the company to go bankrupt.... well, only then would the companies reconsider. But until then, they won't.
monooso 1 hours ago [-]
I don't think there was any suggestion that the story should not have been reported, or that only "surprising" facts should be considered news.
iinnPP 58 minutes ago [-]
Things that cease to be surprising can also cease being important. Which is made clear reading the remainder of the post.
It's my take as well, frankly.
sph 5 hours ago [-]
> Facts are reported because they are important.
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.
raxxorraxor 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
mrweasel 6 hours ago [-]
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).
paganel 4 hours ago [-]
There’s no unbreakable secure tooling, none. It might be unbreakable against script-kiddies level of hacking, even though I have my doubts even about that, but Snowden and the general atmosphere during the last decade or so have proved that State actors can put their hands on almost any piece of data out there, either through genuine hacking or other means involving their monopoly on violence.
TingPing 20 minutes ago [-]
It’s absolutely possible to verify something anonymously.
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
raxxorraxor 6 hours ago [-]
I won't use the eID because I don't believe in its promises. I don't need a third party, which would be completely dependent on government, to put a signature on my net access.
I would even prefer the dubious service because of the relationship dynamics I mentioned. Best case is that age limits for the net should be enforced on device by parents. Problem solved, no unnecessary infrastructure needed.
ImPostingOnHN 3 hours ago [-]
Theoretically you could have anyone sign and attest to your age at any time. So maybe the government gives you an attestation of 0 at birth, with timestamp (allowing age to be calculated at any time), as part of the normal new-human bureaucracy. And/or maybe you can separately hire an accredited (co-signed?) lab to perform carbon dating on you later on :)
etiennebausson 6 hours ago [-]
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.
0xbadcafebee 9 hours ago [-]
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.
baybal2 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
SeanAnderson 9 hours ago [-]
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.
xyzzy123 9 hours ago [-]
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.
doikor 8 hours ago [-]
That is exactly what EU is doing with its age verification law. Basically the service provider just has to accept the certificate and check that it is valid and all the cert says is "is over X years old".
And the fact that the companies have to implement the system themselves is just crazy. It is very obvious that if the government require such a check it has to provide the proof/way of checking just like in the physical world it provides the id card/passport/etc used for checking this.
troupo 7 hours ago [-]
> just like in the physical world it provides the id card/passport/etc used for checking this.
In Sweden it wasn't the government that provided id cards, but the post office and banks. It became the government's job sometime after Sweden joined the EU, after the introduction of the common EUID standard.
Yeah we have something similar here in Finland with banks doing most of the (strong) identification.
This also makes things difficult for immigrants for the first month or two in the country as a lot of services (like making a phone or internet contract) require this identification to use but it is also a bit of a hassle to get a bank account (but getting a new bank account in a different bank once you have a bank account to do the strong verification takes like 2 minutes)
There is a government system but most don't use it but I expect once the eu digital identity wallet thing rolls around a lot of ppl will switch (or be required to?) to that
But very importantly this government, bank id, the identification part of the eu id wallet or really any identification system should not be used for age verification as it actually identifies the user not just give a proof that the user is over X years old.
Ekaros 7 hours ago [-]
These systems likely could be extended to just provide age information. If there truly was a wish for it. The suomi.fi systems can be configured. To pass or not pass address for example. So I see no need to pass personal identity number.
doikor 7 hours ago [-]
Yes and the "backend" (what provides the certificate to the app) for the age verification app for Finland will most likely be suomi.fi (or some dvv.fi thing directly) systems.
But we can't realistically expect every service that needs age check to work with 27 (eu countries) different systems but instead we need to unify it into a single api contract which is what this age verification app basically does.
ninalanyon 6 hours ago [-]
We have BankID in Norway, run by DNB (I think). A single service that uses my personnummer (like a social security number but actually unique) as my user name and logs me in to almost all government services, banks, insurance companies, etc.
Tor3 2 hours ago [-]
And unfortunately it's also used in some places outside the ones you're mentioning, e.g. private persons renting out their camper (I've seen this). Which opens the doors to fraud, as has happened too many times (the fraudsters make it look like a normal bank-id lookup, gets you to do it twice, and then they have enough to open your bank account and withdraw money. If they can get you do to it three times they also have enough to remove the limit on withdrawal, and empty your account).
The system is highly convenient and pretty safe, but it does still need vigilance from the user. Which is tricky, re all those phishing attempts and click-scams which people fall for again and again and again.
dangus 6 hours ago [-]
> And the fact that the companies have to implement the system themselves is just crazy.
Isn’t this how most industry regulations work? It’s not like the government provides designs to car companies to reduce emissions or improve crash safety.
doikor 3 hours ago [-]
Government does issue passports for identiftying their citizens when traveling. It is the one who made/enforces the law that requires that so it is the one who has to provide the means to do that.
Or are you suggesting that anyone should be able to make their own passport?
Or a bit closer example. If there was no official id cards/passports/etc (there currently is no official way of proving your age online) and the government made a law that mandates that one has to be over X to buy alcohol. Who’s job is it to provide the means to prove that you are over X?
For the car a proper analogy would be the goverment requiring drivers license. Who provides the drivers license? Should every manufacturer provide its own?
raxxorraxor 6 hours ago [-]
You mean not collecting IDs is the real answer. Easy solution is the best solution and it already is mainstream.
This is an example why that was a bad idea in the first place. No damage control for bad solutions will change that.
mindslight 9 hours ago [-]
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.
Terr_ 9 hours ago [-]
If I had my 'druthers, there would be a kind of physical vending machine installed at local city hall or whatever, which leverages physical controls and (dis-)economies of scale.
The trusted machine would test your ID (or sometimes accept cash) and dispense single-use tokens to help prove stuff. For example, to prove (A) you are a Real Human, or (B) Real and Over Age X, or (C) you Donated $Y On Some Charity To Show Skin In The Game.
That ATM-esque platform would be open-source and audited to try to limit what data the government could collect, using the same TPM that would make it secure in other ways. For example, perhaps it only exposes the sum total of times each ID was used at machine, but for the previous month only.
The black-market in resold tokens would be impaired (not wholly prevented, that's impossible) by factors like:
1. The difficulty of scaling the physical portion of the work of acquiring the tokens.
2. Suspicion, if someone is using the machine dozens of times per month—who needs that many social-media signups or whatever?
3. There's no way to test if a token has already been used, except to spend it. By making reseller fraud easy, it makes the black-market harder, unless a seller also creates a durable (investigate-able) reputation. I suppose people could watch the vending-machine being used, but that adds another hard-to-scale physical requirement.
michaelt 6 hours ago [-]
> 2. Suspicion, if someone is using the machine dozens of times per month—who needs that many social-media signups or whatever?
Anyone who visits pornhub and doesn't want to open an account?
mindslight 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah, introducing real world friction is seemingly one of the only ways of actually solving the problems of frictionless digital systems (apart from computational disenfranchisement, of course).
It might be a better idea to frame your idea in terms of online interactive proofs rather than offline bearer tokens. It's of course a lot less private/convenient to have to bring a phone or other cell-modem enabled device to the vending machine, especially for the average person who won't exercise good digital hygiene. Still, some sort of high-latency challenge-proof protocol is likely the way to go, because bearer tokens still seem too frictionless.
For example (3) could be mitigated with an intermediary marketplace that facilitated transactions with escrow. If tokens were worth say $2, then even just getting 10 at a time to sell could be worth it for the right kind of person. And personally I'd just get 10 tokens myself simply to avoid having to go back to the machine as much. In fact the optimal strategy for regular power users might be to get as many tokens as you think you might need to use (even if you have to pay for them), and then when they near expiration time you sell them to recoup your time/cost/whatever.
Terr_ 6 hours ago [-]
My concern with some "bring your phone and use it immediately" scheme is that someone could pierce the privacy by looking at a correlation between the time an account was mode or a pattern of network-traffic occurred, versus the time someone was using/near the vending machine.
Adding large and unpredictable amounts of latency makes that kind of correlation weaker and hopefully impractical.
beeflet 7 hours ago [-]
>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.
That is not nessisarially true. There are ZK setups where you can tell when a witness is reused, such as in linkable ring signatures.
Another simple example is blind signatures, you know each unblinded signature corresponds to a unique blind signature without knowing who blinded it.
raxxorraxor 6 hours ago [-]
The easy solution is the best one. Just don't collect the info. Any problems resulting from that need to be handled differently.
Proven to work and we wouldn't be dependent on untrustworthy identity providers.
beeflet 6 hours ago [-]
I agree. It is possible, but that does not mean it should be done.
The thing is with such a ZK system you are still collecting and compiling all this data, it's just done by some sort of (government?) notary and there is a layer of anonymity between the notary and the verifier (which they can cooperate to undo).
The real political problem is the concentration of personal information in one place. The ZK system just allows that place (notary) to be separate from the verifier.
mindslight 6 hours ago [-]
Sure, but making use of that introduces new problems.
Fundamentally it limits a person to one account/nym per site. This itself removes privacy. An individual should be able to have multiple Discord nyms, right?
Then if someone gets their one-account-per-site taken/used by someone else, now administrative processes are required to undo/override that.
Then furthermore it still doesn't prevent someone from selling access to all the sites they don't care about. A higher bar than an activist simply giving it away for free, but still.
beeflet 6 hours ago [-]
>An individual should be able to have multiple Discord nyms, right?
Yeah, I think so. I mean this is like my 20th hacker news account. I am using my 5th discord account right now.
But at the same time it would be an interesting to see how anonymous yet sybil-proof social media would work out.
I get the feeling that it's already pretty easy to buy and sell fake IDs, so I don't think it would pan out in practice. I also had the same idea as you: if such a system were to exist, you could sell proofs for all the services you don't use.
Usually, these zero-knowlege proofs are backed by some sort of financial cost, not the bureaucratic cost of acquiring an ID. All of these "linkable" ZK proofs are aimed at money systems or voting systems.
In the blind-signature based money systems, a big problem used to be dealing with change; you had to go back and spend your unblinded signature at the signatory to get a new one. In a similar fashion, maybe you could make it so that users could produce a new ZK proof by invalidating an old one? So you could retire an old nym if you get banned, and create a new nym but you could only have one at a time? IDK if that is a reasonable tradeoff.
immibis 7 hours ago [-]
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.
beeflet 7 hours ago [-]
Make it so that the proofs are not reusable.
bsimpson 11 hours ago [-]
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.
Thailand has a big problem with identity theft, and another big problem with Chinese criminal syndicates committing various kinds of scams and fraud. So while they might share that biometric data with US government agencies, it seems more likely to me that at least one identity theft racket has acquired some of it.
jonasdegendt 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
octo888 3 hours ago [-]
Fingerprints are not required in the UK to apply for a passport (for UK citizens who didn't apply for naturalisation etc). Biometric doesn't just mean fingerprints.
eleveriven 7 hours ago [-]
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
somenameforme 4 hours ago [-]
> "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.'
L-four 9 hours ago [-]
Developer time is more valuable than user data. The market is being efficient.
kalaksi 7 hours ago [-]
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.
baobabKoodaa 5 hours ago [-]
Externalized costs aren't weighed in that calculation
hulitu 8 hours ago [-]
No.Just greedy.
codedokode 11 hours ago [-]
Also this is an issue with people willing to send important documents to some company with which they do not even have a written agreement.
fourside 11 hours ago [-]
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.
robinsonb5 6 hours ago [-]
> Some open source projects have also starting adopting Discord to manage their communities.
And I've chosen not to engage with more than one such community because I'm not perpared even to give Discord my phone number, let alone any kind of ID document. Luckily there's nothing on Discord I care about that much, so I'm not having to make too difficult a choice. I totally get why most people won't take such a stand.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 10 hours ago [-]
I'm not willing, I just don't have a choice. The US should regulate it from the top down like Europe does
SamDc73 10 hours ago [-]
Not sure what you mean by "like europe" because in Europe they are trying to implement `European Digital Identity (EUDI)` for age verification, which will make stuff like this even worse ....
doikor 3 hours ago [-]
You are not supposed to use EUID for age verification. Instead you use the age verification system.
EUID is made for working with government agencies, banks, etc where you need proper identification of the person and the age verification for verifying ones age (it doesn't even say how old you are just that you are over X years old)
End goal is to unify them into the same app at some point but the certificates/validation flows are different. Also as the use cases are very different for the proper identification a whilelist is used on who is allowed to request it. With age verification as it is just a certificate that anyone can validate against the public key so no whitelisting possible (or wanted really)
throwaway473825 9 hours ago [-]
On the contrary, third parties will only get to know the age of the users, not their identities.
SamDc73 8 hours ago [-]
“Linkability is especially problematic because untrusted entities, such as attribute providers and relying parties acting together, can correlate and link auxiliary information to the same user, thereby breaching privacy and enabling tracking, profiling, or de-anonymisation.” [1]
That’s assuming EUDI never gets breached — but if Google and every major tech company has been, it’s only a matter of time, but this will have way more personal info ....
I've been using discord for 5 years and never upload my ID … And I don't want discord (or any other company) to know my age, or any other identification ...
For sure, but with the EU system you'd just give discord an expiring certificate that proves you're over 18. They can leak that all they want, it's worthless otherwise. Right now you have to upload your actual ID which is obviously extremely dangerous if leaked. So yes, even though there are obvious problems that you mentioned, the EU implementation is better.
raxxorraxor 2 hours ago [-]
EUDI requires Google or Apple, I hope it is DOA. It is even bloated before anyone adopted it.
SamDc73 6 hours ago [-]
I mean leaked from the EUDI side.
> the EU implementation is better.
It's better than the current implementation, sure, but you can never beat zero identifiers
gambiting 6 hours ago [-]
Again, for sure and I agree with you - but we're talking about institutions that already have our IDs in some form or another, so just asking them to issue a certificate that says "yeah this user is actually over 18" seems like a no brainer functionality on top of an existing system. Like obviously our government office has a copy of my passport and ID card, but if those leak then we have a much bigger problem as a country.
raxxorraxor 6 hours ago [-]
That is not true, EUDI is a security problem instead of a solution. It is trivial to correlate the info and there is a critical path where a breach would expose even more.
Best security: Don't collect. Nothing comes close, no even the best ZK setup.
Also, as a European citizen I really don't want it. Ironically governments aren't mature enough for that.
hulitu 8 hours ago [-]
You must be new here. /s
10 hours ago [-]
rwky 5 hours ago [-]
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.
yibg 10 hours ago [-]
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.
petre 9 hours ago [-]
Don't governments require them to chech people's IDs to make sure they aren't kids?
eviks 9 hours ago [-]
Do they also require permanently storing the document instead of just the check result?
hulitu 8 hours ago [-]
Oficially, no, unoficially, yes.
throwaway473825 9 hours ago [-]
It depends on the implementation. The EU's European Digital Identity Wallet will allow users to prove that they are over 18 without sharing any other personal information.
immibis 7 hours ago [-]
Anonymous means you can pay someone $2 to use theirs.
whatevertrevor 6 hours ago [-]
Surely that's solved easily by ensuring a 1:1 association between the proof of age and account?
stackbutterflow 4 hours ago [-]
For us it's too late. But we must push for better laws and build better systems for those that come after us.
cookiengineer 9 hours ago [-]
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.
gloosx 7 hours ago [-]
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.
johndhi 1 hours ago [-]
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.
nirui 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
AlienRobot 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think you have become jaded. It's just the truth of the internet.
If you upload anything to the internet, it's public. Even the passwords you type are potentially public.
andsoitis 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Not tractable.
austhrow743 8 hours ago [-]
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.
aydyn 8 hours ago [-]
The enforcement could be done by incentives, making sure the penalty for such breaches is large.
andsoitis 8 hours ago [-]
Sure, but they would still happen is my point.
stackbutterflow 4 hours ago [-]
Audit at random? With severe penalty in case of non compliance.
paganel 4 hours ago [-]
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.
southernplaces7 7 hours ago [-]
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.
eleveriven 6 hours ago [-]
It's really just creating massive honeypots of sensitive data that will eventually leak. And when it does, the consequences are always on us
BolexNOLA 10 hours ago [-]
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
Gigachad 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Suzuran 42 minutes ago [-]
Penetrations of this sort happen differently.
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.
eviks 9 hours ago [-]
It's getting better, but never reaching good, so still no surprise
tacticus 10 hours ago [-]
i mean it's only every other week we see orgs like TCS handing out admin
hulitu 8 hours ago [-]
> Huge data breaches of large tech companies are becoming increasingly rare as security in general is getting better.
Citation needed. /s
cough Microsoft cough
Vipsy 7 hours ago [-]
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.
eleveriven 6 hours ago [-]
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
wosined 6 hours ago [-]
The biggest problem is giving data to people in the first place.
Anduia 8 hours ago [-]
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?
> 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
6 hours ago [-]
3 hours ago [-]
codedokode 11 hours ago [-]
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?
BLKNSLVR 10 hours ago [-]
The Discord message (in Australia at least) specifically says:
The information you provide is only used to confirm your age group, then it's deleted
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.
peanutz454 9 hours ago [-]
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.
Krasnol 8 hours ago [-]
I just looked up "Openfeint".
It took me a while to find the connection to Discord. Not sure if I did because it seems like some mobile app for people who play mobile games with some connection to some Japanese network and hosted in China or something?
cokecan 8 hours ago [-]
OpenFeint was founded by the same guy who founded Discord.
From the Wikipedia page: "In 2011, OpenFeint was party to a class action suit with allegations including computer fraud, invasion of privacy, breach of contract, bad faith and seven other statutory violations. According to a news report "OpenFeint's business plan included accessing and disclosing personal information without authorization to mobile-device application developers, advertising networks and web-analytic vendors that market mobile applications"."
Krasnol 7 hours ago [-]
Oh wow ok.
Now I understand :D
elAhmo 4 hours ago [-]
Unless they get fined for this, nothing will change.
magicalhippo 10 hours ago [-]
From the previous[1] statement:
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.
jeffparsons 5 hours ago [-]
There is no reason for a company like Discord to ever see the ID. The owner of each relevant form of ID — usually a government agency/department — should provide an attestation service, such that users prove their identity to the agency and the agency tells the company "yes, this user is who they say they are".
It's not that hard. Legislators around the world are consistently dropping the ball on this.
magicalhippo 5 hours ago [-]
Doesn't seem like they did. From the original article I referenced earlier:
One of Discord’s third-party customer service providers was compromised by an “unauthorized party,” the company says. [...] The unauthorized party “did not gain access to Discord directly.”
jeffparsons 5 hours ago [-]
The third party company shouldn't ever need to see the IDs, either. Same issue.
magicalhippo 4 hours ago [-]
When governments do things the wrong way around, like mandating age control before they have a method for doing that in a secure manner, what's a company to do?
encrypted_bird 11 hours ago [-]
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.
eleveriven 6 hours ago [-]
Either the deletion promise is a lie, or the third-party vendor was storing the data anyway
crossroadsguy 6 hours ago [-]
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.
_ink_ 5 hours ago [-]
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?
whiplash451 6 hours ago [-]
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.
xxs 6 hours ago [-]
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.
sampli 10 hours ago [-]
deleted = database column
crossroadsguy 6 hours ago [-]
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".
o11c 10 hours ago [-]
Lying is usually legal.
And even if lying is illegal in a particular context, it's de-facto legal since nobody ever gets punished for it.
schaefer 10 hours ago [-]
fraud is not legal.
There's a difference between lying on the playground and fraud in a business setting.
o11c 10 hours ago [-]
Again: fraud is de facto legal.
It is ubiquitous in every part of the business world, both internal and consumer-facing.
eviks 9 hours ago [-]
De facto is the opposite of de jure, so no, non-enforcement doesn't make it legal
LoganDark 37 minutes ago [-]
Again, nobody said it was legal. They said de facto legal, which does not mean it's actually legal but just that it's effectively treated as legal.
ocdtrekkie 8 hours ago [-]
A more useful construct is that civil offenses are only a problem if someone is aware of, motivated, and able to afford to sue you over it. Businesses do a lot of arguably illegal things that are not likely to lead to an actual lawsuit.
verytrivial 4 hours ago [-]
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.
MaxikCZ 3 hours ago [-]
Its as if the big social media companies lobbied for extra redtape, eh?
Similar to storing passwords as unhashed/plaintext.
Bender 2 hours ago [-]
My preference would be just requiring site operators to add the RTA header [1] for anything that could potentially be adult in nature or user contributed content and let parents decide if devices should have parental controls. Not perfect, nothing is but would protect most small children. Teens will easily bypass any method as many today watch porn together in rated-g/pg video games that allow setting up a streaming player in-game.
why would one give their government ID to Discord?
eleveriven 7 hours ago [-]
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
baobabKoodaa 5 hours ago [-]
But our subcontractor made a contractual promise to use only sub-subcontractors who use only sub-sub-subcontractors who promise to be secure!
atbvu 1 hours ago [-]
Every time I see a data breach caused by a third party vendor, I can't help but wonder why are these big companies so deeply reliant on outsourcing, yet so lax when it comes to controlling security?
theknarf 8 minutes ago [-]
Usually some regulation change that the company is not aware off, they have to run to find a fix as soon as possible, some business guy who don't know anything about tech find a vendor who are ready to sell a solution (they probably created their whole business last month on a gamble that the new regulation would be passed and that businesses would be rushing for a solution). Then they simply buy that solution "for compliance" as a top down decision, even when internal employees ring the warning bell.
pbohun 53 minutes ago [-]
The Principle of Least Privilege is one of the foundational aspects of security. Governments should be enforcing that not requiring companies to collect very sensitive information like they are currently doing. Things like "prove your age", digital ID, and Chat Control are actively malicious when it comes to safety, security, and privacy.
fishmicrowaver 12 hours ago [-]
You've got to be a complete moron uploading your gov ID to discord
axus 11 hours ago [-]
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.
Podrod 9 hours ago [-]
It's channels marked NSFW that you need verification for and it's also incredibly easy to bypass with a VPN.
drawfloat 9 hours ago [-]
This applies to all users and isn’t related to OSA (though that will probably make leaks like this more likely).
crossroadsguy 6 hours ago [-]
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.
giancarlostoro 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Culonavirus 11 hours ago [-]
You can come up with all kinds of excuses, but Discord is not, and NEVER WAS a trustworthy company.
> You've got to be a complete moron uploading your gov ID to discord
^ Still stands.
giancarlostoro 7 hours ago [-]
I'm not making excuses for companies retaining PII longer than they should. I'm simply stating why someone might give their ID. Another reason is to verify yourself as a bot developer, though supposedly that is usually done via an entirely different third party.
ternera 11 hours ago [-]
This hits the nail on the head. The big issue here is that the submitted photos were not deleted and that is quite concerning to me.
giancarlostoro 7 hours ago [-]
This should be a warning to anyone providing function in any way similar to what Discord is doing. Do not keep PII longer than you legally have to. Don't have to keep it at all? Delete it. Leave a redacted record such as "Image verified by x, removed on x after unban" or something simple if you must. Remove PII from ticketing systems especially on a platform like Discord where users want to be private by design.
sph 4 hours ago [-]
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.
4 hours ago [-]
Crosseye_Jack 11 hours ago [-]
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.
ryandrake 10 hours ago [-]
> 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.
rs186 3 hours ago [-]
Nobody believes the policy or even cares about the policy. They need to use the service, because everyone else is using the service, and they don't have a choice. Plain and simple.
Crosseye_Jack 10 hours ago [-]
In the UK we have the ICO (https://ico.org.uk/) who have the ability to fine companies who fail to live up to their data retention polices and/or fail to take adequate security measures to prevent or contain a serious personal data breaches.
If the UK Government are determined to enforce companies having to validate user ID's to use the company's services, then the government better well be determined to enforce our data protection laws too. Governments can not have it both ways (esp as the UK government also want to role out new digital IDs that will need to be checked when getting a new job), demanding users hand over ID to access services but not kick butts when those services fuck things up is just idiotic (Ok its the government, they make being idiots a profession), but that's not the fault of the user.
I'm mad at both Discord (for not securing their customers data inline with their published polices), and at the government (for forcing them into collecting the data in the first place, if Discord didn't have the data to begin with it can not be exposed).
But I can not be mad as users of a service, who though no fault of their own just wished to continue to be in communication with their friends and were faced with the no-win choice of providing ID or being denied access to a communication platform.
(just to be clear, I was not breached in this leak so I'm not being salty about the leak, but I see the point of view of the avg user because I see how the avg person uses the net every day.)
ryandrake 9 hours ago [-]
I'd have much more sympathy if this was the first instance ever of a corporation being negligent with people's data, and nobody was expecting it. We have to expect it, now. Corporations have a horrible track record of irresponsibility, and governments have a horrible track record of not punishing them. Data breaches are absolutely routine. Knowing this, it's very foolish to hand over ID through the Internet to someone. The top poster in this thread[1] has it right. At this point, you have to assume everything you submit or type into a web site is public information--that's how bad companies have gotten.
I assume if I run out into the middle of the motorway, I'm likely to get hit by a car. That's why I don't do that.
> I assume if I run out into the middle of the motorway, I'm likely to get hit by a car. That's why I don't do that.
The problem with this is that governments are now requiring you to cross the motorway if you wish to continue having the friends you have already made, but promise that the motorways are now safe for you to cross and they will hold to account anyone who makes crossing motorways unsafe, and the DoT have said "Its fine, we have put in crossings on the motorway to allow you to do so safely!"
Your avg joe is going to take those reassurances made by multiple parties and assume the activity that would otherwise be risky is safe under these circumstances.
When people go on thrill rides at amusement parks and get injured because the operator or manufacturer fucked up, we don't blame the rider "saying they should know better, look at all of those ride failures in the news!", as they expected the ride to be built to a high standard, it be maintained, operated corrected, and have safety watchdogs keeping an eye on everything.
LadyCailin 5 hours ago [-]
I find it interesting where society draws the line in victim blaming. Because it is absolutely a spectrum, and there isn’t really a pattern. Personally, I don’t victim blame in this case, except for the people that explicitly voted for these short sighted “think of the children” politicians, but of course there’s no way to single them out here.
BolexNOLA 10 hours ago [-]
You don’t remember what it was like to just not think about this stuff too much because all our peers weren’t either.
How many of us freely and gleefully gave our info to Facebook, Google, etc all through the 2010’s? How many continue to?
jamwil 5 hours ago [-]
Pure victim blaming.
Nathanba 12 hours ago [-]
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.
laylower 45 minutes ago [-]
Will the British Government be held liable for ID Thefts from this? If they hadn't created a honeypot with minimal security would this info now be out there?
WTF were they thinking about?
miroljub 6 hours ago [-]
It's great news. Introducing totalitarian laws and rushing companies to implement them, who would've thought something would go wrong?
I hope this incident and future data breaches will finally raise awareness of which direction many regimes are going.
armada651 6 hours ago [-]
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.
miroljub 6 hours ago [-]
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.
eternauta3k 7 hours ago [-]
More governments should provide a system like the German electronic ID*, which lets you prove your age without revealing other information.
* Tragically underused because impractical
consp 6 hours ago [-]
As far as I have heard zero knowledge proofs have become optional (thus dead) in the EU wallet specification. I expect selective disclosure in all form to be completely axed next.
luplex 6 hours ago [-]
not just impractical, but also not easy and free to integrate with your service. Seems designed to push you to use a commercial product.
In Belgium we have a service called "itsme". Had it for ages, works very well, used to be mainly for government but banks are also switching to it.
neilv 12 hours ago [-]
This is not OK, and the reporting is not OK.
Opening with:
> Discord has identified approximately 70,000 users that may have had their government ID photos exposed as part of a customer service data breach announced last week, spokesperson Nu Wexler tells The Verge.
Then a big PR quote, letting a potential wrongdoer further spin it.
Then closing with:
> In its announcement last week, Discord said that information like names, usernames, emails, the last four digits of credit cards, and IP addresses also may have been impacted by the breach.
This is awful corporate PR language, not journalism, on a big story about probable corporate negligence resulting in harm to tens of thousands people.
Here's the bare minimum kind of lede I expect on this reporting:
Discord may have leaked sensitive personal information about 70,000 users -- including (but not necessarily limited to) government IDs, names, usernames, email addresses, last 4 digits of SSN, and IP addresses.
I'm ready to block both Discord and The Verge.
zahlman 11 hours ago [-]
> Discord may have leaked sensitive personal information about 70,000 users -- including (but not necessarily limited to) government IDs, names, usernames, email addresses, last 4 digits of SSN, and IP addresses.
Credit card numbers are not SSNs, and I can't fathom why Discord would have the latter (I certainly never gave them any government ID either). Not to mention, "last 4 digits" of a credit card number will commonly appear on, for example, store receipts that people commonly just leave behind. Usernames can hardly be called sensitive information, either. The point is all the other stuff being tied to the username.
nemomarx 11 hours ago [-]
Age verification is "scan your government ID or give us a detailed video of your face from various angles, open and close your mouth" etc. Not sure which is better to give out in a breach
heavyset_go 11 hours ago [-]
It's enough data that, combined with photos and videos from social media, could allow for more convincing deepfakes of your average person.
It's also enough data to improve surveillance and facial recognition systems, allowing them to identify you more easily.
encrypted_bird 11 hours ago [-]
I think it's less a case of which is better and more of which is less bad...
Spooky23 11 hours ago [-]
It’s an escalation path. When you store and image of an ID unnecessarily, then associate it with those last four digits, you’ve created a way to link other data sources to individuals.
Most scenarios I’ve worked with, you toss the ID image once you validate it.
heavyset_go 11 hours ago [-]
The fact that the data is digitized, indexed and can be easily correlated with other data points is what turns your seemingly innocuous 4 numbers into a way to better impersonate, phish, or otherwise harm you.
jay_kyburz 11 hours ago [-]
I think discord is one of the services that requires age verification in some countries.
Hikikomori 6 hours ago [-]
This is what most of journalism has been for quite some time. Read some of Noam Chomskys work.
timpera 3 hours ago [-]
I work at a company where we also store government IDs in Zendesk. I've alerted management multiple times but no one seems to care. It's a disaster waiting to happen…
TavsiE9s 3 hours ago [-]
Leave paper trails (emails most likely) and keep hard copies.
b00ty4breakfast 3 hours ago [-]
I understand I grew up in a different era but it is beyond absurd to me that a chat application requires government ID from it's users. I understand the rationale but I do not find it convincing in the least, especially with the way that security is treated at basically any entity that has this kind of info on file.
I do not like this world that we have created and I would like to apply for a full refund
jefozabuss 3 hours ago [-]
Rationale is likely the requirements of age verification rules by UK, some US states, etc.
We could likely see a bit more of these data leaks in the future I guess, due to how there are more and more countries/states adopting this.
bArray 4 hours ago [-]
Looking forward to being forced to provide my government ID to access Discord [1], when they have only just suffered a major breach. Good stuff.
Asking this out of curiosity: is it a requirement, that such data is being stored once the verification process is completed?
3eb7988a1663 12 hours ago [-]
That is the bonkers thing about this story. Why take on the liability? Get what you need and toss the responsibility. If you must store it (which seems unlikely) put that extra-bad-if-leaked information behind a separate append only service for which read is heavily restricted.
jpalawaga 11 hours ago [-]
Because there is no liability.
If they were fined $10k per leaked ID, then there is a serious liability there.
Right now, they publish a press release, go 'oopsie poopsie', maybe have to pay for some anit-fraud things from equifax if someone asks, and call it day.
ryandrake 11 hours ago [-]
> Right now, they publish a press release, go 'oopsie poopsie', maybe have to pay for some anit-fraud things from equifax if someone asks, and call it day.
Don't forget the usual Press Release starting with "At [Company], we take security very seriously..."
heavyset_go 11 hours ago [-]
Because it's free training data and great for building profiles on users so you can make money showing them targeted ads
tavavex 7 hours ago [-]
Discord isn't really monetized through 'traditional' targeted advertising, though.
fuomag9 7 hours ago [-]
Discord no, but my credit card from Advanzia bank actually changed their TOS to allow AI training with your submitted documents for their anti-fraud model.
I complained to the CNPD of Luxembourg and sent a GDPR request, as they defaulted to doing this WITHOUT asking for consent (super illegal as doing AI training with your data is definitely not the minimum required to offer the service)
nothercastle 10 hours ago [-]
The data is valuable to sell or train ai on. You can use that data to train ai hr people or whatever
Spooky23 11 hours ago [-]
I’m in a different industry, but when I’ve had to collect identification for reasons we extracted metadata at the time of presentation, validated it, and discarded the image.
We would never get clearance from counsel to store that in most scenarios, and I can’t think of a reason to justify it for a age or name verification.
stravant 10 hours ago [-]
Why are people assuming they did store it after the process was completed?
With the relatively low number leaked here it could have been information collected actively during an ongoing breach, not a dump of some permanent database.
imtringued 7 hours ago [-]
There are only a handful of countries where you are legally mandated to dox yourself and it's a recent change.
You'd expect the numbers to be "low" either way.
itake 12 hours ago [-]
Just a guess, but they may store the original ID card to audit duplicate accounts.
If their machine learning models, think that two people are the exact same, having the original image, especially a photo of the same ID card could confirm that.
selcuka 12 hours ago [-]
There are image processing methods for hashing people's faces. They don't have to store the actual photo to do that.
itake 11 hours ago [-]
Models have racial biases, can't support aged faces, or look-alike faces.
heavyset_go 11 hours ago [-]
You don't have to use ML models for this.
itake 8 hours ago [-]
Can you elaborate more? Discord has 656m users. if 10% upload their ID, they'd have 65m ID photos to search through. There are 2 use-cases here:
1/ Safety Bans (lets pretend 0.01% of ID card users have been banned for safety reasons: 650k accounts)
If a user submits their selfie/ID card, Discord needs to compare the new image with one of the 650k banned (but deleted?) images. I can't possible think how a human could remember the 650k photos well enough to declare a match.
Even if such a human existed with this perfect recall, there can't be very many of them on this planet to hire.
2/ Duplicate account bans
If a user registers, how can a support staff search the 65m photos without ML assistance to determine if this is a new user or a fraudster?
Y_Y 2 hours ago [-]
If they can't handle that many users then they should close signups.
The product scales, but sfaely using users' data doesn't? Hardly an excuse.
selcuka 6 hours ago [-]
0.01% of 65M is 6,500. Also apparently only 70K people uploaded their IDs.
That being said, you can still hash faces and metadata (such as ID numbers) instead of storing the whole ID as a scanned photo, if the information is only used for duplicate checking. Hashing does not increase the racial bias. If your model has a bias it will always have a margin of error.
AlienRobot 2 hours ago [-]
Do you understand how image hashing works? You don't need machine learning just to check if two images are potentially identical.
dathinab 11 hours ago [-]
IMHO this is a pretty dump approach to the problem
while there probably are some countries with terrible designed passport for most they are designed to be machine readable even with very old style (like >10year old tech) OCR systems
so even if you want to do something like that you can extract all relevant information and just store that, maybe als extract the image
this seems initially pointless, but isn't, if you store a copy of a photo of a people can use that to impersonate someone, if you only steel the information on it it's harder
outside of impersonation issues another problem is that it's not uncommon that technically ids/passports count as property of the state and you might not be allowed to store full photo copies of it and the person they are for can't give you permission for it either (as they don't own the passport technically speaking). Most times that doesn't matter but if a country wants to screw with you holding images of ids/passports is a terrible idea.
but then you also should ask yourself what degree of "duplicate" protection you actually need wich isn't a perfect one. If someone can circumvent it by spending multiple thousands to endup with a new full name + fudged id image this isn't something a company like discord really needs to care about. Or in other word storing a subset of the information on a passport, potentially hashed, is sufficient for like way over 90% of all companies needs for secondary account prevention.
in the end the reason a company might store a whole photo is because it's convenient and you can retrospectively apply whatever better model you want to use and in many places the penalties for a data breach aren't too big. So you might even start out with "it's bad but we only do so for a short time while building a better system" situation, and then due to the not so threatening consequence of not fixing it (or awareness) it is constantly de-prioritized and never happens...
Gigachad 12 hours ago [-]
Just store the name and the fact that it was verified and delete the photo. You get what you need without holding on to a massive liability.
itake 11 hours ago [-]
How does this help you identify duplicate accounts? If the original photo is deleted, do you just trust the model to be correct 100% of the time when it rejects the newly created account? Or do you keep the original photo and allow a human to make a final decision?
Gigachad 10 hours ago [-]
There are a million other signals for duplicate accounts anyway. Location, OS, device fingerprints, communities joined, etc. If those match and real name matches that’s enough data.
And if a few people manage to slip through it’s not really an issue. They will either get banned again for the same reasons or not violate the rules anymore so who cares
fuzzfactor 12 hours ago [-]
The best years online were when it was universally recognized that government ID's are completely unsuitable for interaction with the internet in any way.
Like it was since the beginning when government ID's first became a thing.
dathinab 12 hours ago [-]
in case of the EU it's more the opposite
GDPR requires data minimalism and ~use case binding so if you submit data for age verification there is no technical reason to keep it after knowing your age so you _have to_ delete it.
StanislavPetrov 13 hours ago [-]
Requirement by who? Discord isn't required to demand your ID, let alone store it.
I didn't feel comfortable giving discord my phone number when they demanded it, so I lost access to the open source communities that insist on collaborating there.
I wish breaches like this would cause people to reconsider their choices but sadly, it's unlikely most users will move.
nulld3v 11 hours ago [-]
I also wish open-source communities would move off of Discord for another reason: Users are limited to joining a maximum of 100 servers.
I've hit the cap and it's driving me crazy. It's really easy to hit it since each friend group, hobby group, gaming community, and open-source community often all have their own servers.
noitpmeder 10 hours ago [-]
I can barely keep up with 6 semi active discord servers, each with tens of semi active channels... Much less think about doing it with hundreds. More power to you, must have figured out a good notification scheme
jamwil 4 hours ago [-]
I am super curious how other people use discord. I’m like you—trying and basically failing to keep up with 6 servers. I just want to watch a power user out of morbid curiosity. I suspect they are also browser tab hoarders, which I’m also curious about.
Aachen 8 hours ago [-]
That limit is per account, right?
giancarlostoro 12 hours ago [-]
The issue is if you don't enforce the phone number requirement on your server you get all the trolls who don't use phone numbered accounts. I wish Discord would allow you to restrict known VPNs instead of requiring phone numbers. It would solve so many issues. I know a LOT of VPNs wont be caught, but if you block MOST non-residential IP blocks, you'll capture a lot of them.
csmantle 12 hours ago [-]
Trolls likely have access to phone number farms though. And in some parts of the world it's extra cheap to mass-register phone numbers. Trolls wouldn't be harmed in a data leak, only normal users get hurt.
noitpmeder 10 hours ago [-]
Most trolls aren't the kind of trolls that run large scale networks, they're the 12 year olds you triggered by saying BLM
elevation 12 hours ago [-]
Phone numbers may be required to bring order to a vast international user base, but a few dozen devs and a small user community can function without invasive moderation tactics.
7 hours ago [-]
fishgoesblub 12 hours ago [-]
The communities I'm in don't require a phone number and very rarely gets trolls. Proper moderation is the most important part. Occasionally there's a spambot, but they're just hacked accounts from pre-existing real users, and as someone that uses a VPN with Discord, I'd prefer to not be treated as an evil-doer please.
giancarlostoro 12 hours ago [-]
Sure, are the communities you're in tens of thousands of users or more? Because things change really quickly depending on how many users are active, if it's a community server, and the subject matter. Even a programming Discord is a hell hole. You cannot have enough mods ever. Things fall through the cracks and people get hurt. You can't moderate DMs or know the wellbeing of tens of thousands of your users who are being harassed in DMs and have no idea how to get help. Discords full of a lot of youth.
Theres users who rotate community servers on a VPN / new spun up alts. They are relentless. I noticed the communities that are massive and do not have this problem to this extend all require phone number.
hn1291378112 11 hours ago [-]
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Gigachad 12 hours ago [-]
Discord doesn’t require a phone number. It’s individual community owners who opt to require it. You can create a server that doesn’t require one but it effectively means you can’t ban people since they can just sign up again on a new account.
ikkun 10 hours ago [-]
I tried making an account once, technically my account was created but trying to log in only gets me a screen that requires I verify a phone number. I was never even able to attempt to join a server. I assume it's my browser's privacy settings and ad blocker but I'm not sure.
frumplestlatz 11 hours ago [-]
I refuse to use their “create a server” language. It is not a server by any definition of the word server.
You can set up a community on their servers.
I’m not sure why they chose to use misleading language, but it is misleading.
Aachen 8 hours ago [-]
Fun fact: Discord called them guilds before realising that they could compete with paid services that set up actual (e.g. Mumble) servers for you by pretending this is equivalent and free
I also have trouble going along with the doublespeak. If a supermarket called their beer apple juice, I'd also not be offering my friends "apple juice", I'd call it what it is
Guild is innocuous enough and since the API docs still call their communities that, that can be a term to use among those in the know to have common and clear terminology
This seems like a distinction without a difference. If you used a paid service offering Mumble servers that used some custom software that allowed them to offer multiple ... "servers" on different ports/IP addresses from a single daemon, would you really care?
Focusing on the fact that it's not really a "server" because they aren't running as separate processes seems like utterly silly pedantry, and we probably don't even know if that's actually true regarding Discord or not.
Gigachad 10 hours ago [-]
It’s wrong in terms of the technical implementation and right in terms of user experience.
Gamers are well familiar with different communities actually hosting servers and instances for games or voice chat pre discord. Discord offers the same experience but without physically being different servers. Keeping the name guides users in the same way OSs call it a recycling bin despite not actually being a bin.
noitpmeder 10 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure it matters in this situation ...? Server/instance/VM/shard/... when used in this context is pure corporate naming BS. They'd have called it "setting up a new circle jerk" if they thought it would increase metrics
LoganDark 12 hours ago [-]
Discord has an account flag that triggers a mandatory phone number verification. It happens if you do things like send messages too quickly over the span of about a minute, or send multiple friend requests, or join too many servers, or start too many DMs, or indeed, join any server that is set to require phone number verification.
zahlman 11 hours ago [-]
I am in dozens of servers and have not encountered this demand for a phone number. I have been in servers that required it for moderators as part of 2FA, and I just declined to moderate there. It had no effect on my use of any other server.
malfist 11 hours ago [-]
Just because something hasn't happened to you, doesn't mean it doesn't happen to other people
> You'll be required to register a phone number to your Discord account in order to continue the use of it.
Aachen 8 hours ago [-]
If it doesn't rain one day, that's not evidence there exists no rain
That's about the level of evidence that your specific user account offers to you about whether phone verification is a thing their anti-spam algorithms can trigger...
jjulius 47 minutes ago [-]
The funny thing about evidence is that Discord even has a page stating exactly what LoganDark said...
It has happened to me on two accounts. OP is also not the only other person I've seen who has dealt with it.
Bully for you that you haven't encountered it, but it's certainly a thing.
BoorishBears 11 hours ago [-]
Anyone on HN should know the fickle nature of fraud detection, especially when the cost of getting it wrong is 0.
quintes 10 hours ago [-]
Why. I see Australia is intending on blocking YouTube and other platforms. Expect this more regularly
mikert89 12 hours ago [-]
When can people start going to jail for this kind of thing
f4uCL9dNSnQm 5 hours ago [-]
It is UK. They find it hard to jail people that lied on purpose to jail innocent people, multiple times.
heavyset_go 11 hours ago [-]
After a revolution
EarlKing 12 hours ago [-]
Yes, good question: When can we start jailing CEOs and their employees for these blatant violations of the CPRA and GDPR?
JoshTriplett 11 hours ago [-]
And the politicians who mandate ID-checking requirements, without which the "government IDs" part of this wouldn't have happened.
(To be explicit, not supporting jailing here, just removing from office.)
Imustaskforhelp 11 hours ago [-]
Was thinking the same exact thing!!
krainboltgreene 10 hours ago [-]
Immediately if you move to China.
rr808 11 hours ago [-]
You know it'll be the IT pros going to jail not the execs right?
sunaookami 8 hours ago [-]
Good, then they can stop the excuses for implementing the most shittiest things that ruined the web and just say no.
miohtama 7 hours ago [-]
ZenDesk boasts on this:
”Discord's investments in AI-driven self-service with the Zendesk CX platform have enabled the company to provide seamless support.”
baby 7 hours ago [-]
Why does discord have gov IDs? At this point we already have the tech to prove using zero knowledge that we have an ID
missingrib 10 hours ago [-]
Why haven't zero knowledge proofs shined in this area? Can anyone explain?
tzs 9 hours ago [-]
They are on the way. The EU is field testing such a system now.
Nasrudith 5 hours ago [-]
Aren't ZKPs useless for their paranoid 'children will die if they see boobies' crap because then they'd allow for a single common token to be shared willy nilly? Not to mention that surveillance is the clear government actual goal.
geenat 8 hours ago [-]
Why are they permanently storing government ID's?
11mariom 6 hours ago [-]
First problem is - they never should have such data. Why you are sending them IDs?
kwar13 9 hours ago [-]
How many times the same thing... most even tell you that they verify you and then delete your ID.
ZK proofs cannot become mainstream fast enough.
tiku 10 hours ago [-]
Why is it still so hard to identify yourself online?
jonplackett 6 hours ago [-]
Why are they even storing these? Once they have verified them as old enough, why keep them?
These companies should be forced to release a proper account of events - like Google/Cloudflare do when they mess something up
6 hours ago [-]
qwertytyyuu 11 hours ago [-]
Wait already? I was hoping to hear about it next year. Maybe it’s a good thing that it happened early so they can fix?
saagarjha 11 hours ago [-]
No, it’s a good thing it happened early so they can remove it.
whatever1 10 hours ago [-]
Oh no! Anyway software engineers are not real engineers so nobody will be held accountable.
andsoitis 9 hours ago [-]
What is the use case for uploading your government ID to Discord?
tavavex 7 hours ago [-]
Two of the other replies are wrong. This isn't actually about the new 18+ age verification stuff that countries seem to be ramming through right now - as far as I know, Discord uses third parties for that service. The link from Discord's statement in the article mentions that this is about appealing account bans of users who were suspected to be under the legal age to use Discord at all (<13 in most places). This is an older thing, which also explains the amount of data that was leaked.
hmry 8 hours ago [-]
Joining "NSFW channels", which usually means porn. But some normal channel are also tagged NSFW to opt out of Discord's forced content filter on public servers, which has occasional baffling false positives.
andsoitis 8 hours ago [-]
So people are willing to upload their govt IDs to watch porn.
Wow.
miohtama 7 hours ago [-]
Online Safety Act for the UK. You will be safe.
0xfffafaCrash 9 hours ago [-]
As the article says it’s used for age verification
5 hours ago [-]
buyucu 2 hours ago [-]
This is why social media should never ever ask for an ID.
It's still very much alive! Regularly active on a few channels spread across different IRC servers. Still works great.
rendall 9 hours ago [-]
I once accidentally set an incorrect birth year on Twitter. They locked me out of my account and insisted that I upload a government ID to unlock my account.
Aachen 8 hours ago [-]
Did they accept the edited ID with a DoB matching the account data or how did you solve that?
rendall 3 hours ago [-]
I just... sent a scan of my passport. I mean, they promised to delete it right? Nothing could go wrong?
I think it is nice that the GDPR forces companies to not keep too much data about people. And you can only have data that you need for the stated purpose (of course this leaves loopholes but it is good data hygiene to always consider).
For example, if you state you want to verify age, you only need the ID for a couple of seconds. So why didn't they think about the risk of a hack before? They could have done the age verification and then immediately deleted the document. The cynical take is af course they did think about it but would take the fine if it came to that...
Maybe it is good to make an example out of Discord? Don't keep stuff around if you don't need it should be common sense.
Razengan 5 hours ago [-]
And how will they pay for it?
How did we get to this state anyway?
Isn't HN supposed to be populated by the people who work at these companies, the fuck are you guys doing??
neuronic 6 hours ago [-]
This is why I am really looking forward to PIDs in the European Digital Identity ecosystem (EUDI) [1]. This works with the OpenID Verifiable Credentials spec built on top of Oauth2. There are open source solutions in the competition for building the EUDI Wallet and the architecture and reference framework is openly accessible [2]. All credentials are kept with the holder (you) at all times. Basically implementation of the EU eIDAS 2.0 regulation, obviously subject to GDPR.
Mandated to be accessible to EU citizens by 2027 when all Member States have developed a Wallet solution.
Not associated but learned through it at work recently, just awesome project and thought I'd share in this context.
.... The government ID's they only started asking for as a bullshit requirement after running for like 10 years without needing them?
At some point we'll start seeing companies that rotate your passwords automatically and integrate with your autologins, and send immediate reports of breaches / suddenly failing logins.
Wait. Why isn't this a thing
kat529770 3 hours ago [-]
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hn1291378112 11 hours ago [-]
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oguz-ismail 11 hours ago [-]
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Rendered at 13:21:20 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
We need to make sure nobody is surprised. Everyone should rewrite every "upload" button in their head to say "publish".
[0] https://medium.com/@drewsmith_6943/apple-wallet-id-is-the-so...
"Really, your honor, it's hardly different from an author getting a DBA or LLC for his pen name."
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.
This breach is about the manual alternative to that, where you can appeal to Discord customer support if the automated thing says you’re not the right age. They seem to do that in part by having you send a picture of your ID.
I’m sure in their database they’re then just storing the date of birth etc, but then they obviously just don’t bother deleting the private image from the customer service software.
I mean.. if the governments did their jobs and multipled the punishment for a single breach by 70.000 (in this case) and cause the company to go bankrupt.... well, only then would the companies reconsider. But until then, they won't.
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).
Here was an interesting example recently https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
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
I would even prefer the dubious service because of the relationship dynamics I mentioned. Best case is that age limits for the net should be enforced on device by parents. Problem solved, no unnecessary infrastructure needed.
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.
Not some different unstated goal, such as ending online anonymity.
https://ageverification.dev/
And the fact that the companies have to implement the system themselves is just crazy. It is very obvious that if the government require such a check it has to provide the proof/way of checking just like in the physical world it provides the id card/passport/etc used for checking this.
In Sweden it wasn't the government that provided id cards, but the post office and banks. It became the government's job sometime after Sweden joined the EU, after the introduction of the common EUID standard.
And even then online identification is handled by a private company owned by banks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID_(Sweden)
This also makes things difficult for immigrants for the first month or two in the country as a lot of services (like making a phone or internet contract) require this identification to use but it is also a bit of a hassle to get a bank account (but getting a new bank account in a different bank once you have a bank account to do the strong verification takes like 2 minutes)
There is a government system but most don't use it but I expect once the eu digital identity wallet thing rolls around a lot of ppl will switch (or be required to?) to that
https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
But very importantly this government, bank id, the identification part of the eu id wallet or really any identification system should not be used for age verification as it actually identifies the user not just give a proof that the user is over X years old.
But we can't realistically expect every service that needs age check to work with 27 (eu countries) different systems but instead we need to unify it into a single api contract which is what this age verification app basically does.
The system is highly convenient and pretty safe, but it does still need vigilance from the user. Which is tricky, re all those phishing attempts and click-scams which people fall for again and again and again.
Isn’t this how most industry regulations work? It’s not like the government provides designs to car companies to reduce emissions or improve crash safety.
Or are you suggesting that anyone should be able to make their own passport?
Or a bit closer example. If there was no official id cards/passports/etc (there currently is no official way of proving your age online) and the government made a law that mandates that one has to be over X to buy alcohol. Who’s job is it to provide the means to prove that you are over X?
For the car a proper analogy would be the goverment requiring drivers license. Who provides the drivers license? Should every manufacturer provide its own?
This is an example why that was a bad idea in the first place. No damage control for bad solutions will change that.
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.
The trusted machine would test your ID (or sometimes accept cash) and dispense single-use tokens to help prove stuff. For example, to prove (A) you are a Real Human, or (B) Real and Over Age X, or (C) you Donated $Y On Some Charity To Show Skin In The Game.
That ATM-esque platform would be open-source and audited to try to limit what data the government could collect, using the same TPM that would make it secure in other ways. For example, perhaps it only exposes the sum total of times each ID was used at machine, but for the previous month only.
The black-market in resold tokens would be impaired (not wholly prevented, that's impossible) by factors like:
1. The difficulty of scaling the physical portion of the work of acquiring the tokens.
2. Suspicion, if someone is using the machine dozens of times per month—who needs that many social-media signups or whatever?
3. There's no way to test if a token has already been used, except to spend it. By making reseller fraud easy, it makes the black-market harder, unless a seller also creates a durable (investigate-able) reputation. I suppose people could watch the vending-machine being used, but that adds another hard-to-scale physical requirement.
Anyone who visits pornhub and doesn't want to open an account?
It might be a better idea to frame your idea in terms of online interactive proofs rather than offline bearer tokens. It's of course a lot less private/convenient to have to bring a phone or other cell-modem enabled device to the vending machine, especially for the average person who won't exercise good digital hygiene. Still, some sort of high-latency challenge-proof protocol is likely the way to go, because bearer tokens still seem too frictionless.
For example (3) could be mitigated with an intermediary marketplace that facilitated transactions with escrow. If tokens were worth say $2, then even just getting 10 at a time to sell could be worth it for the right kind of person. And personally I'd just get 10 tokens myself simply to avoid having to go back to the machine as much. In fact the optimal strategy for regular power users might be to get as many tokens as you think you might need to use (even if you have to pay for them), and then when they near expiration time you sell them to recoup your time/cost/whatever.
Adding large and unpredictable amounts of latency makes that kind of correlation weaker and hopefully impractical.
That is not nessisarially true. There are ZK setups where you can tell when a witness is reused, such as in linkable ring signatures.
Another simple example is blind signatures, you know each unblinded signature corresponds to a unique blind signature without knowing who blinded it.
Proven to work and we wouldn't be dependent on untrustworthy identity providers.
The thing is with such a ZK system you are still collecting and compiling all this data, it's just done by some sort of (government?) notary and there is a layer of anonymity between the notary and the verifier (which they can cooperate to undo).
The real political problem is the concentration of personal information in one place. The ZK system just allows that place (notary) to be separate from the verifier.
Fundamentally it limits a person to one account/nym per site. This itself removes privacy. An individual should be able to have multiple Discord nyms, right?
Then if someone gets their one-account-per-site taken/used by someone else, now administrative processes are required to undo/override that.
Then furthermore it still doesn't prevent someone from selling access to all the sites they don't care about. A higher bar than an activist simply giving it away for free, but still.
Yeah, I think so. I mean this is like my 20th hacker news account. I am using my 5th discord account right now.
But at the same time it would be an interesting to see how anonymous yet sybil-proof social media would work out.
I get the feeling that it's already pretty easy to buy and sell fake IDs, so I don't think it would pan out in practice. I also had the same idea as you: if such a system were to exist, you could sell proofs for all the services you don't use.
Usually, these zero-knowlege proofs are backed by some sort of financial cost, not the bureaucratic cost of acquiring an ID. All of these "linkable" ZK proofs are aimed at money systems or voting systems.
In the blind-signature based money systems, a big problem used to be dealing with change; you had to go back and spend your unblinded signature at the signatory to get a new one. In a similar fashion, maybe you could make it so that users could produce a new ZK proof by invalidating an old one? So you could retire an old nym if you get banned, and create a new nym but you could only have one at a time? IDK if that is a reasonable tradeoff.
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.
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.'
And I've chosen not to engage with more than one such community because I'm not perpared even to give Discord my phone number, let alone any kind of ID document. Luckily there's nothing on Discord I care about that much, so I'm not having to make too difficult a choice. I totally get why most people won't take such a stand.
EUID is made for working with government agencies, banks, etc where you need proper identification of the person and the age verification for verifying ones age (it doesn't even say how old you are just that you are over X years old)
https://ageverification.dev/
End goal is to unify them into the same app at some point but the certificates/validation flows are different. Also as the use cases are very different for the proper identification a whilelist is used on who is allowed to request it. With age verification as it is just a certificate that anyone can validate against the public key so no whitelisting possible (or wanted really)
That’s assuming EUDI never gets breached — but if Google and every major tech company has been, it’s only a matter of time, but this will have way more personal info ....
I've been using discord for 5 years and never upload my ID … And I don't want discord (or any other company) to know my age, or any other identification ...
[1] https://www.wi.uni-muenster.de/news/5104-new-publication-pri...
> the EU implementation is better.
It's better than the current implementation, sure, but you can never beat zero identifiers
Best security: Don't collect. Nothing comes close, no even the best ZK setup.
Also, as a European citizen I really don't want it. Ironically governments aren't mature enough for that.
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.
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.
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.
If you upload anything to the internet, it's public. Even the passwords you type are potentially public.
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.
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.
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 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
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 took me a while to find the connection to Discord. Not sure if I did because it seems like some mobile app for people who play mobile games with some connection to some Japanese network and hosted in China or something?
From the Wikipedia page: "In 2011, OpenFeint was party to a class action suit with allegations including computer fraud, invasion of privacy, breach of contract, bad faith and seven other statutory violations. According to a news report "OpenFeint's business plan included accessing and disclosing personal information without authorization to mobile-device application developers, advertising networks and web-analytic vendors that market mobile applications"."
Now I understand :D
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.
It's not that hard. Legislators around the world are consistently dropping the ball on this.
One of Discord’s third-party customer service providers was compromised by an “unauthorized party,” the company says. [...] The unauthorized party “did not gain access to Discord directly.”
If Kafka were alive today, he'd see the world has outdone itself.
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.
And even if lying is illegal in a particular context, it's de-facto legal since nobody ever gets punished for it.
It is ubiquitous in every part of the business world, both internal and consumer-facing.
I am not surprised these laws are landing with such little resistence.
We're talking about a solved problem here.
Similar to storing passwords as unhashed/plaintext.
[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single
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.
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.
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.
If the UK Government are determined to enforce companies having to validate user ID's to use the company's services, then the government better well be determined to enforce our data protection laws too. Governments can not have it both ways (esp as the UK government also want to role out new digital IDs that will need to be checked when getting a new job), demanding users hand over ID to access services but not kick butts when those services fuck things up is just idiotic (Ok its the government, they make being idiots a profession), but that's not the fault of the user.
I'm mad at both Discord (for not securing their customers data inline with their published polices), and at the government (for forcing them into collecting the data in the first place, if Discord didn't have the data to begin with it can not be exposed).
But I can not be mad as users of a service, who though no fault of their own just wished to continue to be in communication with their friends and were faced with the no-win choice of providing ID or being denied access to a communication platform.
(just to be clear, I was not breached in this leak so I'm not being salty about the leak, but I see the point of view of the avg user because I see how the avg person uses the net every day.)
I assume if I run out into the middle of the motorway, I'm likely to get hit by a car. That's why I don't do that.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45522379
The problem with this is that governments are now requiring you to cross the motorway if you wish to continue having the friends you have already made, but promise that the motorways are now safe for you to cross and they will hold to account anyone who makes crossing motorways unsafe, and the DoT have said "Its fine, we have put in crossings on the motorway to allow you to do so safely!"
Your avg joe is going to take those reassurances made by multiple parties and assume the activity that would otherwise be risky is safe under these circumstances.
When people go on thrill rides at amusement parks and get injured because the operator or manufacturer fucked up, we don't blame the rider "saying they should know better, look at all of those ride failures in the news!", as they expected the ride to be built to a high standard, it be maintained, operated corrected, and have safety watchdogs keeping an eye on everything.
How many of us freely and gleefully gave our info to Facebook, Google, etc all through the 2010’s? How many continue to?
WTF were they thinking about?
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.
* Tragically underused because impractical
https://www.ausweisapp.bund.de/so-werden-sie-diensteanbieter
Opening with:
> Discord has identified approximately 70,000 users that may have had their government ID photos exposed as part of a customer service data breach announced last week, spokesperson Nu Wexler tells The Verge.
Then a big PR quote, letting a potential wrongdoer further spin it.
Then closing with:
> In its announcement last week, Discord said that information like names, usernames, emails, the last four digits of credit cards, and IP addresses also may have been impacted by the breach.
This is awful corporate PR language, not journalism, on a big story about probable corporate negligence resulting in harm to tens of thousands people.
Here's the bare minimum kind of lede I expect on this reporting:
Discord may have leaked sensitive personal information about 70,000 users -- including (but not necessarily limited to) government IDs, names, usernames, email addresses, last 4 digits of SSN, and IP addresses.
I'm ready to block both Discord and The Verge.
Credit card numbers are not SSNs, and I can't fathom why Discord would have the latter (I certainly never gave them any government ID either). Not to mention, "last 4 digits" of a credit card number will commonly appear on, for example, store receipts that people commonly just leave behind. Usernames can hardly be called sensitive information, either. The point is all the other stuff being tied to the username.
It's also enough data to improve surveillance and facial recognition systems, allowing them to identify you more easily.
Most scenarios I’ve worked with, you toss the ID image once you validate it.
I do not like this world that we have created and I would like to apply for a full refund
We could likely see a bit more of these data leaks in the future I guess, due to how there are more and more countries/states adopting this.
[1] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/30326565624343...
If they were fined $10k per leaked ID, then there is a serious liability there.
Right now, they publish a press release, go 'oopsie poopsie', maybe have to pay for some anit-fraud things from equifax if someone asks, and call it day.
Don't forget the usual Press Release starting with "At [Company], we take security very seriously..."
I complained to the CNPD of Luxembourg and sent a GDPR request, as they defaulted to doing this WITHOUT asking for consent (super illegal as doing AI training with your data is definitely not the minimum required to offer the service)
We would never get clearance from counsel to store that in most scenarios, and I can’t think of a reason to justify it for a age or name verification.
With the relatively low number leaked here it could have been information collected actively during an ongoing breach, not a dump of some permanent database.
You'd expect the numbers to be "low" either way.
If their machine learning models, think that two people are the exact same, having the original image, especially a photo of the same ID card could confirm that.
1/ Safety Bans (lets pretend 0.01% of ID card users have been banned for safety reasons: 650k accounts)
If a user submits their selfie/ID card, Discord needs to compare the new image with one of the 650k banned (but deleted?) images. I can't possible think how a human could remember the 650k photos well enough to declare a match.
Even if such a human existed with this perfect recall, there can't be very many of them on this planet to hire.
2/ Duplicate account bans
If a user registers, how can a support staff search the 65m photos without ML assistance to determine if this is a new user or a fraudster?
The product scales, but sfaely using users' data doesn't? Hardly an excuse.
That being said, you can still hash faces and metadata (such as ID numbers) instead of storing the whole ID as a scanned photo, if the information is only used for duplicate checking. Hashing does not increase the racial bias. If your model has a bias it will always have a margin of error.
while there probably are some countries with terrible designed passport for most they are designed to be machine readable even with very old style (like >10year old tech) OCR systems
so even if you want to do something like that you can extract all relevant information and just store that, maybe als extract the image
this seems initially pointless, but isn't, if you store a copy of a photo of a people can use that to impersonate someone, if you only steel the information on it it's harder
outside of impersonation issues another problem is that it's not uncommon that technically ids/passports count as property of the state and you might not be allowed to store full photo copies of it and the person they are for can't give you permission for it either (as they don't own the passport technically speaking). Most times that doesn't matter but if a country wants to screw with you holding images of ids/passports is a terrible idea.
but then you also should ask yourself what degree of "duplicate" protection you actually need wich isn't a perfect one. If someone can circumvent it by spending multiple thousands to endup with a new full name + fudged id image this isn't something a company like discord really needs to care about. Or in other word storing a subset of the information on a passport, potentially hashed, is sufficient for like way over 90% of all companies needs for secondary account prevention.
in the end the reason a company might store a whole photo is because it's convenient and you can retrospectively apply whatever better model you want to use and in many places the penalties for a data breach aren't too big. So you might even start out with "it's bad but we only do so for a short time while building a better system" situation, and then due to the not so threatening consequence of not fixing it (or awareness) it is constantly de-prioritized and never happens...
And if a few people manage to slip through it’s not really an issue. They will either get banned again for the same reasons or not violate the rules anymore so who cares
Like it was since the beginning when government ID's first became a thing.
GDPR requires data minimalism and ~use case binding so if you submit data for age verification there is no technical reason to keep it after knowing your age so you _have to_ delete it.
I wish breaches like this would cause people to reconsider their choices but sadly, it's unlikely most users will move.
I've hit the cap and it's driving me crazy. It's really easy to hit it since each friend group, hobby group, gaming community, and open-source community often all have their own servers.
Theres users who rotate community servers on a VPN / new spun up alts. They are relentless. I noticed the communities that are massive and do not have this problem to this extend all require phone number.
You can set up a community on their servers.
I’m not sure why they chose to use misleading language, but it is misleading.
I also have trouble going along with the doublespeak. If a supermarket called their beer apple juice, I'd also not be offering my friends "apple juice", I'd call it what it is
Guild is innocuous enough and since the API docs still call their communities that, that can be a term to use among those in the know to have common and clear terminology
'Guilds in Discord represent an isolated collection of users and channels, and are often referred to as "servers" in the UI.' —https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/guild
Focusing on the fact that it's not really a "server" because they aren't running as separate processes seems like utterly silly pedantry, and we probably don't even know if that's actually true regarding Discord or not.
Gamers are well familiar with different communities actually hosting servers and instances for games or voice chat pre discord. Discord offers the same experience but without physically being different servers. Keeping the name guides users in the same way OSs call it a recycling bin despite not actually being a bin.
Makes this huge data leak a real head scratcher
> You'll be required to register a phone number to your Discord account in order to continue the use of it.
That's about the level of evidence that your specific user account offers to you about whether phone verification is a thing their anti-spam algorithms can trigger...
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6181726888215-...
Bully for you that you haven't encountered it, but it's certainly a thing.
(To be explicit, not supporting jailing here, just removing from office.)
”Discord's investments in AI-driven self-service with the Zendesk CX platform have enabled the company to provide seamless support.”
ZK proofs cannot become mainstream fast enough.
These companies should be forced to release a proper account of events - like Google/Cloudflare do when they mess something up
Wow.
Time to pump up those numbers…
we publish this every year or so: https://qbix.com/blog/
For example, if you state you want to verify age, you only need the ID for a couple of seconds. So why didn't they think about the risk of a hack before? They could have done the age verification and then immediately deleted the document. The cynical take is af course they did think about it but would take the fine if it came to that...
Maybe it is good to make an example out of Discord? Don't keep stuff around if you don't need it should be common sense.
How did we get to this state anyway?
Isn't HN supposed to be populated by the people who work at these companies, the fuck are you guys doing??
Mandated to be accessible to EU citizens by 2027 when all Member States have developed a Wallet solution.
Not associated but learned through it at work recently, just awesome project and thought I'd share in this context.
[1] https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
[2] https://eu-digital-identity-wallet.github.io/eudi-doc-archit...
[3] https://github.com/openwallet-foundation/credo-ts
At some point we'll start seeing companies that rotate your passwords automatically and integrate with your autologins, and send immediate reports of breaches / suddenly failing logins.
Wait. Why isn't this a thing