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Games Technology

Roblox Blocks Children From Chatting To Adult Strangers (bbc.com) 52

Posted by BeauHD from the stranger-danger dept.
Roblox is rolling out mandatory facial age-verification for chat features to prevent children from communicating with adult strangers. The platform will restrict chat to verified age groups, expand parental controls, and become the first major gaming platform to require facial age checks for messaging. The BBC reports: Mandatory age checks will be introduced for accounts using chat features, starting in December for Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, then the rest of the globe from January. [...] Rani Govender, policy manager for child safety online at the NSPCC, said action had been needed because young people had been exposed to "unacceptable risks" on Roblox, "leaving many vulnerable to harm and online abuse."

The charity welcomed the platform's latest announcement but called on Roblox to "ensure they deliver change for children in practice and prevent adult perpetrators from targeting and manipulating young users." The platform averaged more than 80 million daily players in 2024, about 40% of them under the age of 13. [...]

Matt Kaufman, chief safety officer for Roblox, told a press briefing the age estimation technology is "pretty accurate." He claimed the system can make close estimates of "within one to two years" bracket for users aged between five and 25. Currently it can be used voluntarily by anyone in the world.

Roblox Blocks Children From Chatting To Adult Strangers More | Reply

Roblox Blocks Children From Chatting To Adult Strangers

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  • Fuck (Score:4, Funny)

    by CoolDiscoRex ( 5227177 ) on Thursday November 20, 2025 @06:45PM (#65808565) Homepage

    How am I supposed to recruit employees for my sweatshops now?

  • Doubt (Score:5, Interesting)

    by liqu1d ( 4349325 ) on Thursday November 20, 2025 @06:49PM (#65808577)
    All the age verification stuff from the UK âporn embargoâ(TM) was bypassed easily. Also presumably children are going to have their faces scanned? That seems like a future shitstorm brewing.
    • The point is to collect the data. All it takes to verify a kid is simply having the ISP flag the connection as "from child" at their routers and it's impossible to bypass. Hell you could even mandate such things under a "know your customer" style law. (That's what they are effectively doing here, just in the worst way possible.)

      But they won't, because again, the point is to collect the data to match their faces to names later.

    • What's to prevent using a really good printed image as the "face-scan verification image" thing?

  • If I'm a 'parent' and I make an account for my 'child', how do they know? I fail to see how this will deter predators.

    • Re:How do they know? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by CrankyFool ( 680025 ) on Thursday November 20, 2025 @07:50PM (#65808651)
      I'm assuming that was a sincere question rather than rheotrical: I am, in fact, a parent (no quotes), and I have children (no quotes). When I set them up on Roblox, I specifically set up those accounts with their actual ages, because I wanted Roblox to know that they're kids and do whatever it can (which is not enough, but better than if it thinks they're adults) to protect them.

      • Even better is to just avoid Roblox, surely?

        How best to protect your kids in a room full of paedos? Avoid the room altogether. Unless the cost/benefit makes sense - which it doesn't.

      • Sorry, that's not what I meant. If a predator sets up a 'child' account, won't that account be able to talk to other real children?

      • Likewise - and I know of another no-quotes parent who didn't realise what they'd setup and had all sorts of people talking to their kid. Thankfully they nipped that in the bud before anything serious happened.

        Honestly, I can't think of any reason Roblox needed to have an option to allow this sort of thing. That it's taken them this long to do something about it is really pretty poor on their part. Are they really going to lose revenue they actually want from this? Oh noes, a few paedos might cancel their su

        • Yes it is. Why? Because it's collecting facial recognition data on kids. (and adults.) An ISP could easily flag a connection as "from kid" with the proper setup. Hell the government could even mandate such things, and it would be far easier to enforce than to expect a random ass company on the other side of the world to willingly spend money to ID your kids for "safety" purposes. Let alone the legal issues of sovereignty with what the UK is demanding of the entire world.

          But of course this is just security

          • How would the ISP know that the "kid account" you set up is truly "for a kid"?

            How about instead of sticking the kid in front of the computer all the time, the kids went outside and rode bike and played with other kids?

  • When I see things like "facial age verification", I have major concerns, whether we're talking about a site like Roblox (whatever that is — I don't know, and don't really care), social media, porn, or any other site. How are you going to do it without violating the privacy of every person who creates an account? And how are you going to verify that the person using the account is the person who created it without causing an even bigger privacy violation?

    We do need some sort of age verification syst

    • There really needs to be an international age verification working group that spends the next five years coming up with a system, then pressures everyone to implement it.

      I don't think creating a centralized world ID database is going to be a win at this point.

    • We do need some sort of age verification system, but we need it to be designed in a way that protects privacy.

      We've had such a system for thousands of years: parents.

  • My middle child, when she was age 25-30, could easily pass for 15.

    Lawsuits abound from this.

  • It's not like verifying the age of people who are under 18 is hard or something. Just because they have almost no digital footprint or legal records to check against and can be talked into posing in front of a webcam pretending to be someone else for thirty seconds for in exchange for an ice cream cone should pose no problems whatsoever.

  • So you're saying all that one of these creeps on Roblox needs to do is grab one of the kids he has locked in his basement to pose for the camera for a few seconds?

    • It could be repeated randomly during play. Every now and again, access the camera and verify the player.

      Now, that could have gotten my grandson banned when he was showing me the Rainbow Friends game he likes, but that's easier to deal with than molestation.

      • So just record them constantly huh? That escalated quickly. Or, and hear me out here, we could mandate parents monitor their damn kids online, instead of allowing them to treat paying for their kids (phone / data plan) to go to the virtual drug alley, on the well known bad side of town, on a regular basis as a perfectly normal and socially acceptable thing to do.

  • LMAO (Score:2)

    by Archfeld ( 6757 )

    Because adult strangers are ALWAYS a danger. The poor kids are more likely to be molested by their local gym teacher or "Uncle Fred" than they are a total stranger adult. I'm really concerned that todays kids are not going to learn how to interact with ANYONE, much less a total stranger. How do they get through life ?

    • Are they? I wonder if the rates and propensities have changed over the decades. I can't say for sure, but I suspect I encountered at least two pedos when I was growing up - they'd shake my hand and stroke my palm with a finger in the process. Felt weird at the time, knife-sharpeningly suspicious looking back.

      My parents were noncommittal when I told them, but I wouldn't encounter those guys anymore.

      But of course, the overwhelming majority of adults would go to great lengths to keep a stranger's child

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Archfeld ( 6757 )

        You might be correct. It has been a long time since I was in law enforcement. I gotta say though I think I listen to my kids and their feelings alot more than you were given credit for.

  • Roblox is fixing the problem of others creeping on kids by themselves creeping on kids?

  • This seems like a great effort. But this begs the question, what are they doing about loopholes that allow an adult to look like a child? Otherwise this is just what any politician does.. say something that sounds good to people on the surface while ignoring the details they think others will ignore.
    • Absolutely nothing. The default is to assume the user is a child. Which means any adult who fails / declines to validate gets instant access to kids, and only kids.

      Cue mandatory fines / imprisonment for adults failing to show their digital papers in 3...2...1....

  • This is the wrong approach. Perhaps it'd have been accepted earlier, but they've shot themselves in the foot due to their inaction over the grooming pedophilia groups that were operating with impunity - and seemingly, protection! - on their platform. It was brought to their attention repeatedly, publicly, and they did all the wrong things and did not address the issue.

    Fuck them.

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