As Roblox rolls out new age assurance features to prevent teens and kids from chatting with adults they do not know, it has insisted Australia’s upcoming under-16s social media ban should not apply to its services.
The company, which is releasing the new features in Australia first, said that from Wednesday users will be able to voluntarily have their age estimated by going through the Persona age estimation technology, built into the Roblox app. It will access the camera of a user’s device and take a live estimation of their age based on their facial features.
The feature will become mandatory in Australia, the Netherlands and New Zealand from the first week of December, expanding to the remaining markets in early January.
Once an age check is done, users will be assigned to one of six age groups – under 9, 9-12, 13-15, 16-17, 18-20 or 21+.
Users in each age bracket will only be able to chat to peers in their group or similar groups, Roblox announced.
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The changes were first mooted in September, and were heralded by the Australian eSafety commissioner as proof of the success of their efforts to make platforms safer, having been in negotiations with Roblox for several months about safety concerns for the platform.
A Guardian Australia investigation this month documented a week of virtual sexual harassment and violence on Roblox experienced by a user with a profile set up as an eight-year-old.
The regulator has faced pressure to include Roblox in Australia’s under-16s social media ban, due to come into effect on 10 December. Gaming platforms have an exemption to the ban, but Julie Inman Grant said earlier this month that eSafety had considered the game’s chat functionality and messaging.
“If the online gameplay is the significant or sole purpose, if that were taken away, would the kids still use that messaging functionality to chat? Probably not,” she said.
Speaking to Australian journalists on the planned changes, Roblox’s chief safety officer, Matt Kaufman, described Roblox as an “immersive gaming platform” but added: “I like to think of it as games being scaffolding for social interaction. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what the game is. What really matters is you’re bringing people together to spend time together.”
When asked whether this meant Roblox should really be considered a social media platform under the ban, Kaufman said Roblox considers social media more to be about posting content into a feed that other people then see.
“Then people come back and they look at the feed, and that feed … creates a fear of missing out,” he said “It’s like a popularity contest in our mind that defines the core of what social media is. Roblox is two friends coming home after school and playing a game together. That is not social media.
“And so we do not believe that the social media laws within Australia apply to Roblox.”
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Asked if the new features were offered up to eSafety as a means to avoid being included the ban, Kaufman said the company has had a “constructive dialogue” with the regulator and through the change has been able to offer eSafety the largest example of a platform using age estimation for its whole customer base.
Persona – the age assurance company used by Roblox – participated in Australia’s age assurance technology trial. The results revealed a 61.11% false positive rate for 15-year-olds who were told by the technology they were 16, and 44.25% for 14-year-olds.
Kaufman said the technology is good within one-to-two years of estimation, and if users disagree with a ruling they can correct it using government ID or use of parental controls to set age. He said there were “strict requirements” to delete the data once age is verified. Roblox said ID images are kept for 30 days for purposes such as detecting fraud or abuse and subsequently deleted.
People who do not wish to go through age assurance will still be able to use Roblox, but will not be able to use features such as chat.
More than 150 million people play Roblox every day in 180 countries across the world, including Australia. Kaufman said two-thirds of the users are over 13 years of age.
