Discord has quietly begun testing Incode as a new age verification provider, replacing its previous vendor for some users. The company says face scans are processed on-device where possible, IDs and selfies are deleted after age confirmation, and Discord only receives an age result, not your identity. But the move still raises important privacy questions around biometric verification, third-party trust, and the growing trend of mandatory age checks online, especially after the massive Persona breach linked to Discord user data back in 2025
I like the marketing and on the surface, Matrix looks like something I would be on baord with, BUT… staff and leadership track back to amdocs and thats a red flag for me. Independent code review, analysis, security audit and activity verification might change my mind but at this point I have no incentive to invest effort into verifying matrix is safe after my concern radar has pinged.
Matrix’s origin is Israel’s intelligence community. One could argue the authors are rebels, being insiders themselves, who’ve begun to fight back against the surveillance state that they intimately know. That’s a naive and foolish thing to think. The project’s design is awful from a ‘privacy’ perspective, with the design specifically allowing third-parties to silently ‘intercept’ users’ data–all whilst still being ‘E2EE’. It’s a feature. That’s the amusing thing about its absolutely shit design, but regardless of design choices, encryption has always been a lagging component of the program.
The cynic might observe that the whole thing was proposed with foresight as to create a compromised leader ready to be adopted by organizations that felt they needed a higher degree of security. Matrix is a good solution, or so government bureaucrats are told.
Let Tel Aviv inside.
Matrix is just the protocol so if you think that synapse (the server implementation developed by Element which does have ties to Amdocs) is somehow logging all your data and sending it back or whatever, just use a different implementation. For example, tuwunel is sponsored and used by Switzerland’s government.
I will say that Matrix does not have a good security track record for E2EE and all of the clients use their software to do it. If that’s a dealbreaker, you should probably use something security-oriented like Signal.
Was just addressing the amdocs complaint. Didn’t know about the security concerns but it’s most likely still better than Discord and I’m not sure if Signal is even in consideration when looking for a Discord alternative.
Sure i read that the protocol developments go back to amdocs Governments use palantir so not a benchmark reference for avoiding spyware. Like i said, red flag and lack of motivation to act enough to verify either way. Ymmv