UK's controversial online safety law requires Discord users to scan their face to prove they're adults, and somehow Hideo Kojima's own Death Stranding 2 has given privacy-conscious players a workaround

In compliance with the UK's controversial Online Safety Act, Discord now requires age verification before allowing you to access flagged adult content. That process involves either scanning your face or an ID document, and as you might imagine, there are some privacy concerns from around doing a face scan to access the sorts of materials an adult Discord user might be interested in. Luckily, Death Stranding 2 protagonist and human truck Sam Porter Bridges is here to help.

Discord now works with an age verification company called k-ID, asking users to either scan their face or their ID in order to access adult content. While Discord assures users that ID documents are swiftly deleted from third-party servers and "the video selfie used for facial age estimation never even leaves your device," there are still privacy conscious users who'd prefer not to take any risks.

Can you simply scan somebody else's photo into the facial recognition system? No, because Discord requires you to do a video selfie with instructions like "close your mouth" to make sure you're not faking it. Faced with that dilemma, Dany Sterkhov on Twitter came up with a creative solution: pop open the photo mode of Death Stranding 2, point at Sam's face, and use the expression options to fulfill Discord's demands.

As our friends at PC Gamer have confirmed, it totally works, proving both that Norman Reedus is definitely over 18 and that online age verification is a fool's game that does very little to protect anyone from anything. It has successfully bullied cult classic MMOs offline and brought new restrictions to venerable modding sites, however, so I guess you can't say it's done nothing.

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