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
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.