Bad practice of how the age verification is performed (or did my son received a scam email?)

Dear Sir or Madam,

This is a report of two issues which are of my concern:
1. What I consider bad practice concerning the age verification of Discord users.
2. The act of law regulating the minimal age of capability to perform legal actions in Poland

1.
The email you send reporting the "account pending deletion" due to suspected underage, which was received by my son, bears the following features which sing an act of scam:
- you request significant share of sensitive personal data, protected by EU GDPR act.
- hovewer, you request to sent this data to some strange domain dis.gd; this domain, according to lookup.icann.org, is registered by organization "Hammer and Chisel".
- neither of domains discord.com or discordapp.com seems related by the same ICANN source to "Hammer and Chisel"; both are registered by "NameCheap, Inc." which seem to be the registrar, and not the owner.

So, how one can validate your request, or even believe it is legitimate at all?

2.
When you request to abide the law, you should provide what act of law you refer to.
By Polish Civil Code, an act of law issued on April 23rd, 1964 with the subsequent changes (http://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/DocDetails.xsp?id=WDU19640160093),
the unified text of which is available here: http://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/download.xsp/WDU19640160093/U/D19640093Lj.pdf
it is stated:
- Article 15: Limited ability to perform legal actions have the minors which are at least 13 years old.
- Article 20: A person with limited capacity to perform acts in law may, without the consent of the statutory representative, conclude contracts that belong to commonly concluded contracts in minor current matters of everyday life.

According to the above, the information provided on your help pages regarding the minimal age of Polish citizens is invalid, and without legal reference.

Jazzy

20 Juli 2020 21:37

Hi Paweł Kędzierski,

To answer your first question, Hammer and Chisel used to be the name of the company, but was later changed to Discord. Zendesk (Discord Support Ticketing Service) is under Hammer and Chisel, not Discord. The domain for Hammer and Chisel is registered as dis.gd.

Because your child's account got disabled due to being underage, the only way Discord can verify that the child isn't underage is by checking their age from a Government Issued ID, which could include a Passport, Drivers License, Birth Certificate or anything to confirm your child's age. Once confirmed, this data is then removed from Discord's databases (To comply with Discord's Privacy Policy and GDPR).

Discord's Terms of Service requires people to be over a minimum age to access our app or website, so we are introducing a system to verify that users satisfy that minimum age requirement. We do this to keep our users safe and ensure they don't encounter material that's not appropriate for them. Unfortunately, if you live in Poland, you must comply with their internet safety law, which in this case, you must be 16 and above to use Discords' Services.

If you have any more questions, feel free to reply.

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