Persona age verification is owned majorly by thiel a known epstien associate and a person who is helping ICE kidnap people
Oshul
Thiel is the majority owner of persona the age verification provider for vrchat and he has been seen in the epstien files.
Not only that, he has a notorious history of privacy violations and is currently helping ICE agents with the capturing of families and american citizens.
I implore the devs to seek a new verification provider as association with somone like that puts the trust users have in vr chat at risk.
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Floofers
This is the only thing keeping me from it. The moment they offer another option, not Thiel affiliated, I'll go for it.
DeadManParty
ok. so. rick song is the CEO. all we know is that persona Age verifictation is leaky.
DeadManParty
DeadManParty
Being seen in the epstein files.. is like how the physics youtuber Sabine Hossenfelder... who had no direct ties to epstein and, most of all, no ties to the harm of children. there's a lot of people listed in there that had nothing to do with the abuse of women and children.
Basically, i'm asking for more rigor and i'm sure you can find more evidence. And that you can put it in here.
What I also want you to do is contact the a c l u about this.If you could
You claim he's an associate, but you'll have to explain where, but in the body of your message... you said he was just listed.
And I would like you to give a source because the emails contain many names... a lot of people not involved with the most disgusting crimes.
But the reason v r chat chose persona was that it was based in the european union, where there is some semblance of erasing data retention. They say it on their laws...
At the same time... we all know how those laws are being curtailed, and chat controlled means that the g d p r is absolutely worthless.
And of course, the problem of age verification is that peoples' data will be exposed.
There is an an holy alliance between the worst of the second wave and the worst of the.Reactionary, radical extremist, christians that would now find themselves in very comfortable positions of power.
These are decades and decades.And decades of the conspiracy theory that porn is trying to corrupt people. And that conspiracy theory has been going on since the nineteen seventies.
And of course, like any conspiracy, they blame the Jews and say that pornography is a national health crisis when it's not.
Shnoo
Don't forget the most recent development: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2026/02/age-verification-vendor-persona-left-frontend-exposed
"In those files, the researchers found details about the extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users. Beyond checking their age, the software performs 269 distinct verification checks, runs facial recognition against watchlists and politically exposed persons, screens “adverse media” across 14 categories (including terrorism and espionage), and assigns risk and similarity scores.
Persona collects—and can retain for up to three years—IP addresses, browser and device fingerprints, government ID numbers, phone numbers, names, faces, plus a battery of “selfie” analytics like suspicious-entity detection, pose repeat detection, and age inconsistency checks."
DeadManParty
Ok at what degree of involvement? Because Sabine Hossenfelder is mentioned in the fies... she had no hand in the traffickinh or any tie to epstein directly.
It only has her in the files because some scientist was hoping to disprove her theory.
That's it.
Not that science or those with an interest are guilty.
There's terrible things that directly have people shown to engage in the worst of crimes.
Context would be nice. And the whole idea of age verification is not to protect anyone... as we have been warned about for over a decade.
Narrik Synthfox
It's too late for me since I already verified before all of this was known, but definitely please, change to a different verification service and actually look into them first to make sure their security is good enough and that they aren't tied to something that could put people at risk.
the_real_j
they also lied about not storing your data, see https://vmfunc.re/blog/persona (https://ghostarchive.org/archive/Ak8tZ)
ckochi
the_real_j Now Persona looks really really really suspicious. Why do they exist, and what do they even operate?
Honestly, I want VRChat to suspend the process immediately.
DeadManParty
ckochi well, some people in the uk and carnegie thought it would be a good idea to quote unquote protect kids
But it's more surveillance and persona comes in saying we can make a lot of money and a lot of people in the global online safety regulators.Network and g r a m said that they could make a lot of money off of this period and not to mention bypass legal restrictions and restraints, to try and surveillance everyone
ckochi
DeadManParty "Don't you want to protect children?"
> Looks inside
> Bad actors aren't affected at all
> Looks around
> Companies screaming "Pay us, we are the safest vendor!"
> Turns out they're passing our data to their
true
customer> Wow, what a business
> Thinks again
> Why I can't see stuff online without their approval?
DeadManParty
ckochi
We were and are very much warned.
But everyone was okay with the toning down of sex and sexuality in so many games, over the past twelve years from bad faith Actors that claim, they wanted to get rid of something "problematic" want to get rid of something that's demeaning, or gross or childish... and yet the payment processes come in. And then do exactly what an infamous critic wanted to happen to make sure that these games couldn't exist at all...
It's just jack thompson with lipstick... and a lot of very horrible people at the helm.
To cover up characters and everything else to be more appealing to china. Or it is the prudishness of uk, Wales, Ireland, and australia . Despite them, having the highest rates of abuse.
Now I know, it's very gross to defend some of the kind of content. Games like no mercy and other such dojun and stuff is hard to defend. But if you don't defend the worst of it, they're going to use the most inflammatory language available... to make sure to jawbone, any creative pursuit.
Even aggo crab the devs of the peak game that was so popular.They were the ones that took out a pith helmet out of a fence, and yet they also see how the censorship
Well you can read for yourself.
We weren't called free expression advocates a fourteen years ago
DeadManParty
ckochi. I talked to a Twitter user about all this. And when all was said and done, they just said I wanted kids to have unrestricted access to born, because that's what you'd expect from the wrinkled face of a bitter old church lady.
The fact that it had to take this for the original poster to make the thread... we don't know if these claims are valid.
But the very concept of age verification should absolutely send chills through your spine.
The government has already been tracking, and using this data for some time. They just outsourced it and made it more legal to do in their war on terror and their war on trans people.
Project, twenty twenty twenty one twenty twenty five and their manifesto was to actually stop all pornography from existing. And also all trans content, because the two such things are the same thing i people's eyes.
We saw this when exodus cry eroded section two thirty.
We saw this with the mind geek and discussing affairs of pornhub, but now we're seeing it affect fiction... and remember fiction has no victim.
It is the attacking of consenting adults. We even have a bill in the United Kingdom. That is saying that any and all breath play or even stories about it should be banned.So that makes fifty shades of gray. AS Illegal to own CHILD EXPLOITATION MATERIAL
DeadManParty
ckochi these are are all questions. You can get answers to by just googling.
ckochi
DeadManParty Thanks for sharing info.
I've been watching their move for months and it never stops. I'm very tired of the situation that every website I use is turning into spyware.
It's been told and I really think "Age Verification" is a well-thought-out Trojan horse.
Child safety, terrorism, hate speech, bad algorithms.. their
solutions
are always one thing, 'let us control what people can express'. What it does is simply masking the problem that they promise to solve. And yet, they give big-techs permission to control what people post online. It's pretty much the opposite action to what we should expect from what they say.By the way, I kind of like some of 'bad' arts, and found out, it's a way to share your mind, telling your friends you're not alone who thinks about it. It's probably a good thing to open yourself and releasing your weird ideas you may hate.
Malaalei
Yo, the heck is this? Bad. Very bad. Obscene decision for VRC to do.
DeadManParty
Malaalei did they know/
Malaalei
DeadManParty fair, they might not have... but they know now, and need to change it.
DeadManParty
Malaalei ok. How? The EU based service has a claim of not retaining data... and a possible way to fight back in EU Parliament.
In America. There is no such luck. The question is how involved. How do we know you are right? How would you fix it?
Malaalei
DeadManParty There are many different ways to do age verification that doesn't store personal ID or data in a third party system. Many other companies have done so. If they are compelled by law to specifically use third parties such as persona (which as far as i'm aware, they are not) then they should make an overt and active statement and action about that.
Just because there might be "no such luck" doesn't mean they must quietly and complacently comply.
That said, it is not my job to answer these questions, it is my job to express the opinions of the user. It is their job to find a reasonable solution.
DeadManParty
Malaalei okay, war.Were you when this age verification first rolled out? Where was the upset then?
Atrification, by its nature, in a non anonymous way to store data and government.I ds was never about safety.The electronic frontier foundation has been very vocal about this
DeadManParty
Malaalei ohh, that's all well and good. But government turnout exactly deciding to hop on the common sense Approach.
We had the firm act originally designed to have a common sense approach, but for the revisions, totally scrapped that.
And with what current governments are doing?And like epstein, and everything else they're pushing this age verification.So well, it's like we warned you.We were all warned
FletcherVeyluu
Even as someone who has already been age verified, I’m seconding this. A huge proportion of VRChat’s user base are BIPOC and/or LGBTQ, and using a company that’s in any way involved with Peter Thiel puts them all at serious risk. It also makes me very uncomfortable as a Jewish person, as Thiel rubs elbows with some pretty nastily antisemitic people.
I’m really starting to sour on the idea of age verification in general, I think it mostly just puts people at risk, but if you HAVE TO, then pick a different service, preferably one that isn’t involved with shady people and is actually beholden to privacy regulations. Maybe an EU based company?
ckochi
FletcherVeyluu I have a question, what used to justify age verification for you? What effect did you expect it to have?
I started to hold back since many similar laws appeared to enforce this to popular platforms.
FletcherVeyluu
ckochi Frankly, I don't have a good answer. I think I just trusted VRChat, but it was extremely naive of me in hindsight.
ckochi
FletcherVeyluu Thanks for replying.
I had been trusting them all until the point too.
I’m figuring out what’s the actual selling point of it since it sounds vague all the time. But I’ve never expected it goes this bad alone.
DeadManParty
FletcherVeyluu you shouldn't have trusted age verification at all.
This like is saying that the other age verification businesses would make sense when they're uploading the same I.Ds and everything else.
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