this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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[–] northface@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Following the announcement of Discord's new age verification policy - already in force in the UK and Australia, with a global rollout beginning in early March - social media users shared screengrabs of prompts to consent to Persona collecting their data over the weekend.

As I understood the above paragraph from the article, two things are happening that Persona is involved in:

  1. The implementation of an age verification system, that may or may not be required for all servers.

  2. Users are being asked about consent on mining their data, that may (according to the FAQ) be kept for up to a week.

And from the FAQ:

If you're located in the UK, you may be part of an experiment where your information will be processed by an age-assurance vendor, Persona. The information you submit will be temporarily stored for up to 7 days, then deleted.

It sounds to me that these are two separate things currently happening, even if the data from #2 might be used in the execution of #1 when verification is required.

If I read the article correctly, even if only some servers require age verification Persona still seems to ask for consent to mine your data. Considering how jaded most people are when it comes to cookie prompts, it would be understandable if kids just clicked yes on this consent screen to continue chatting with their friends, unaware that they just gave away their current and future data to this Palantir-linked company, even if they haven't shared (or will ever need to share) their ID.

An ID verification scheme will always be broken by design due to the sensitive information that is shared and needs to be (cough) securely processed by some company, but at least it's a more explicit decision and action of multiple steps required by you.

Allowing continous data mining, however, is just a simple click and something you will have forgotten about in a few hours or days.