Age verification: how mssgs does it, and how Discord does

On 22 September, Discord switched on age assurance for everyone. Every account is now sorted into adult, teen or unconfirmed, and an account Discord cannot place gets the teen settings until it shows otherwise, if need be with a video selfie or a photo of an ID. People keep asking us whether mssgs will do the same. The short answer is no. Here is how each of us handles age, and why we keep people safe without ever asking for their face or their ID.

How Discord does it

Discord asks for your birthday when you sign up. You have to be at least 13, or older where local law says so. Since 22 September 2026, that birthday is no longer the end of it.

• An age model. Discord estimates your age from signals in your account: the servers and games you are in, how active you are, how old the account is, and your device. It says the model never looks at your messages, uploads, username or bio, and that it places more than 90% of accounts on its own.
• Checks when the model is not sure. Depending on your country and device, you can confirm with a credit card, the age range your app store shares, a passport in Google Wallet, a video selfie that estimates your age on your device, or a photo of your ID together with a selfie. The checks run through a company called k-ID, with Veratad handling ID scans and Stripe handling cards. Discord says these vendors delete what you send right after the check, and that it only receives the outcome and the method used.
• The UK and Australia. The age model is not available there yet, so adults confirm their age actively.
• Teen settings. Teens and unconfirmed accounts get sensitive images blurred, or blocked in DMs from strangers. Messages from people who are not their friends go to a requests inbox, age-restricted servers, channels and app commands stay closed, and they cannot speak on Stage.

Discord did not get here smoothly. In October 2025 it disclosed that a third-party customer service provider had been breached and that about 70,000 users may have had photos of their government ID exposed: IDs they had sent in to appeal an age decision. Discord named the provider as 5CA, which disputes that it was hacked. In February 2026 Discord announced the global rollout for March, ran into a wave of criticism and postponed it, with its CTO writing that "we failed at our most basic job". The version that launched in September runs face estimation on the device, lists its vendors and has retired the manual review process behind the breach.

Much of this is driven by law. The UK's Online Safety Act, Brazil's new rules for children online and an app store age law in Texas all push platforms towards checking ages, and Discord has to meet them.

How mssgs does it

We never ask for an ID, a selfie or a face scan, and we do not work with an age-verification company. We do not store your date of birth either: there is no field for it anywhere in mssgs. Here is what we do instead.

• You confirm your age, and that is it. When you create an account, you accept terms that require you to be at least 13, and between 13 and 15 you need a parent’s or guardian’s consent. No documents, no selfie, no birthday.
• An age band, not a birthday. Where your phone can share an age range, such as Apple’s age range on recent iPhones, mssgs uses that, and you can decline. We keep one of four bands (under 13, 13 to 15, 16 or 17, 18 and over) and nothing more precise.
• Protective limits until a parent links. An account in an under-18 band cannot share its location, use the map, comment publicly on the feed or create guest links for games until a parent has linked to it in the Parent Center.
• A parent view without the messages. In the Parent Center, the teen starts the link with a code from their parent, and the parent accepts. A linked parent sees who their teen has chats with, how long they were connected each day, and whether location sharing is on and how far it reaches, never where they are. They get an alert when a friend is added, a community joined, a location shared or a report involves their teen. No parent can read messages, and there is no setting that changes that.
• The same protection for everyone. Whatever your age, every new chat starts as a request that you accept first, blocking is quiet, and reports go to volunteer community moderators, with mssgs staff stepping in when something is urgent or the law requires it.

Side by side

Safety without a scan

We built mssgs on a simple idea: the safest data is the data you never hand over. So we protect people through how the app works, not through what we collect about them.

• No IDs to leak. An ID photo you never send cannot end up in a breach. There is no pile of faces, passports or birthdays sitting with a vendor, because mssgs never asks for them.
• Protection in every chat. Every new conversation is a request you accept first, blocking is quiet, and volunteer community moderators handle reports, with our own team stepping in when something is urgent. It works for everyone, whatever their age, without a single check.
• Parents in the loop, never in the messages. The Parent Center shows who a teen talks to, how long they were connected and whether location sharing is on, and it never shows a single message.
• No adult corners to police. mssgs has no age-restricted servers or channels, so nobody ever has to prove they are over 18 to use any part of it.
• Your data stays close to home. The servers mssgs runs on are hosted in the Netherlands, one-to-one chats are end-to-end encrypted, and there are no ads, no tracking, and nothing is ever used to train AI.

Rules around age keep evolving, in Europe too, and our principle stays the same: whatever check the future brings, it belongs on your own device and leaves us with nothing more than an age band.

Read more about the Parent Center, our child safety standards and the age rules in our terms.

Want a group chat that never asks for your face or your ID? Start your group on mssgs: free on iPhone, Android, desktop and the web.

Discord’s side as of 1 October 2026, from the sources below.