Specifically, the symbols look like remnants of Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, or MIME, a 30-year-old standard for encoding emails. The protocol underlying email transmits messages as short strings of simple ASCII characters, so as people started writing longer messages and trying to include formatting and symbols, MIME was developed as a way of encoding them in ASCII.

At the heart of the controversy is a major change to Discord’s age verification process. Originally, the company explicitly assured users that video selfies submitted for facial age estimation would “never leave a user’s device.”

However, according to Eurogamer, British users have recently discovered a quiet update to the platform’s FAQ. It reveals that some may now be funnelled through a different vendor, Persona, where verification data will actually leave the phone.

Under this new “experiment,” the selfie and identification information provided by UK users will be temporarily stored on Persona’s servers for up to seven days before deletion. While Discord maintains that “all details are blurred except your photo and date of birth,” the shift from on-device processing to cloud storage represents a significant departure from previous privacy guarantees.