Link: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/25/hackers-expose-the-massive-surveillance-stack-hiding-inside-your-age-verification-check/

We’ve been saying this for years now, and we’re going to keep saying it until the message finally sinks in: mandatory age verification creates massive, centralized honeypots of sensitive biometric data that will inevitably be breached. Every single time. And every single time it happens, the politicians who mandated these systems and the companies that built them act shocked—shocked!—that collecting enormous databases of government IDs, facial scans, and biometric data from millions of people turns out to be a security nightmare.

Well, here we go again.

A couple weeks ago, Discord announced it would launch “teen-by-default” settings for its global audience, meaning all users would be shunted into a restricted experience unless they verified their age through biometric scanning. The internet, predictably, was not thrilled. But while many users were busy venting their frustration, a group of security researchers decided to do something more useful: they took a look under the hood at Persona, one of the companies Discord was using for verification (specifically for users in the UK).

What they found, according to The Rage, was exactly what we would predict:

Together with two other researchers, they set out to look into Persona, the San Francisco-based startup that’s used by Discord for biometric identity verification – and found a Persona frontend exposed to the open internet on a US government authorized server.

In 2,456 publicly accessible files, the code revealed the extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users, bundled in an interface that pairs facial recognition with financial reporting – and a parallel implementation that appears designed to serve federal agencies.

Let me say that again: 2,456 publicly accessible files sitting on a government-authorized server, exposed to the open internet.

By hackers they mean people who can read. Clownshoes news headlines .

Techdirt says 2,456 files as if it's 2,456 separate things, but it's actually just the source code for their web frontend and that source code is comprised of 2,456 files. Normally, the source code for the web frontend isn't a big deal, but apparently the frontend that they're exposing is for a service that normal people aren't supposed to be able to see, and the capabilities of the service are made public. There's still a lot that could be going on behind the scenes and not surfaced through the frontend.

It works with the classical definition hacker.

Person with functional brain got it!

I hope people learn that this how age verification trend is a massive Trojan horse for tyranny.

Sadly "people" and "learn" don't go together well...