EFFector Volume 38, Issue 4

☺️ Trust Us With Your Face

Welcome to an all-new EFFector, your regular digest on everything digital rights from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

In our 839th issue: Discord's controversial roll out of mandatory age verification, a leaked Meta memo on face-scanning smart glasses, and a Super Bowl surveillance ad that said the quiet part loud.

When you lose your rights online, you lose them in real life. Become an EFF member today!

Featured Story: Discord Already Knows What Could Go Wrong

In recent years, we've seen a disturbing wave of age verification laws. These are mandates that require services to check users’ ages—often through invasive tools like ID checks and face scans—before letting them access certain content online. Now, the social messaging platform Discord is adopting age verification voluntarily—despite knowing the privacy and security risks age verification poses.

According to Discord, their platform used by gamers and other communities hosts 200 million monthly active users. And last year, attackers accessed roughly 70,000 of those users’ government ID photos—submitted as part of age verification schemes—after compromising Discord’s third-party customer support system. Nevertheless, Discord announced this month that it's rolling out age verification globally.

Discord says its new age verification system will delete records of any user-uploaded government IDs, and that any facial scans will never leave users’ devices. The company also says that it will not associate a user’s ID with their account (only using that information to confirm their age) and that identifying documents won’t be retained. We take those commitments seriously. However, users have little independent visibility into how these safeguards operate. They're being asked to simply trust that this time will be different.

Beyond the security risks, we’ve written extensively about why age verification schemes are censorship and surveillance nightmares that chill speech, are prone to error, and violate users' privacy. For a platform with as much market power as Discord, voluntarily imposing age verification is unacceptable.

READ MORE…

‌EFF Updates

👓 META'S FACE SCAN PLANS: Meta is reportedly considering adding face recognition technology to its smart glasses. According to an internal Meta document, the company may launch the product “during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.” On our blog, we present seven billion reasons that this is a bad idea that Meta should abandon.

🔔 RING IN THE DOGHOUSE: Amazon Ring’s Super Bowl ad offered a vision of our streets that should leave every person unsettled about the company’s goals for disintegrating our privacy in public. Disguised as a heartfelt effort to reunite the lost dogs of the country with their innocent owners, the company previewed future surveillance of our streets: a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything — human, pet, and otherwise.

👁 SELLING SURVEILLANCE: Police technology is often sold as a silver bullet, but behind the slick marketing is an under-scrutinized industry that relies on manufacturing the appearance of effectiveness, not measuring it. A new report by EFF, the Center for Just Journalism, and IPVM, cuts through the hype. "Selling Safety" offers journalists tips on seeing through the spin to report accurately on costs, benefits, privacy, and accountability as these invasive and often ineffective tools come to communities across the nation.

🦸‍♀️ PRIVACY'S DEFENDER: Next month, MIT Press will release Privacy's Defender, EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn's personal chronicle of standing up to the Justice Department, taking on the NSA, and tangling with the FBI to protect our right to digital privacy. Available for preorder now, all proceeds from hard copies support EFF’s mission for privacy and free expression. A national book tour kicks off in San Francisco on March 10. Check out our Privacy’s Defender hub to learn more.

Don’t Let Tyrants Co-opt Tech

Technology is supercharging the attack on democracy by making it easier to spy on people, block free speech, and control what we do. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s activists, lawyers, and technologists are fighting back.

Join the movement to Take Back CTRL when you donate to EFF today.

Fresh EFF Gear Is Here

Show off your support for EFF with hot digital rights merch from our online store. Check out the "Let's Sue the Government" ringer tee that sends the signal that our rights are not optional.

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About EFF

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit defending online civil liberties. We promote digital innovation, defend free speech, fight illegal surveillance, and protect rights and freedoms for all as our use of technology grows. Find out more at https://www.eff.org/.

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