If Persona or Palantir were not involved it would be more likely to not be surveillance state shit. But this is obviously not the case. If they wanted to do actually id verification they would use banks or pay a government service. What people are not getting is that in this exchange, you are the product. Palantir was paying Discord to gather our data to track us and sell our data to Palantir's main client. They backed down because it is more profitable to keep all their customers than integrate with Palantir to sell our data and lose x amount of customers.