Update March 13, 2026 Persona reached out to us to clarify that: The exposed testing environment was isolated from production systems. No personal data was exposed. No Persona customer uses all the possible 269 checks. Persona does not work with any Federal agency. Persona only processes data and their customers control Persona’s handling and deletion of data. You can read Persona’s explanation of the issue and their response in this post-incident review. What happened? Researchers investigating Discord’s age-verification checks say they discovered an exposed frontend belonging to Persona, the identity-verification vendor used by Discord. It revealed a far more expansive surveillance and financial intelligence stack than a simple “teen safety” tool. A short while ago we reported that…