Roblox may feel a little more like school starting in June, when it introduces two new account types for its youngest users: Roblox Kids (ages 5-8) and Roblox Select (9-15).
The first tier amounts to grade-school Roblox, with all chat disabled by default and game access restricted to those with a “minimal” or “mild” content maturity label. The second, a sort of junior-high Roblox, will allow chats subject to existing rules, such as limits on age gaps between chat participants, and it will extend access to games with a “moderate” label.
The company will also impose new requirements on user-developed games open to these tiers, including ID verification for developers and ongoing evaluations of how players use them. These games also can’t feature “sensitive issues, social hangouts, or free-form drawing games.”
And Roblox is expanding its parental controls to allow banning or allowing specific games and direct control of chat settings for children up to 15 years old.
(Credit: Roblox)
In a press roundtable in Washington on Monday, Nicky Jackson Colaco, Roblox’s VP for global public policy, noted that, “We have always not only allowed but welcomed young users; we feel like we have an additional responsibility to keep those young users safe.”
The new tiers will also look different; Roblox Kids screens have a blue background, which Chief Safety Officer Matt Kaufman (speaking via video chat at the roundtable) said was meant to make oversight easier for busy, stressed parents trying to monitor their kids’ online lives.
But where a school should be able to know just how old its students are, Roblox cannot—any more than rival social sites that ban users younger than 13, a demographic granted stricter privacy protection under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Instead, Roblox has leaned into technology to verify users’ ages, either via a video selfie analyzed by software or by uploading a government-issued document.
(Photo by Riccardo Milani / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images)
Last October, Roblox began requiring age verification for chat usage; in January, it made it mandatory worldwide. “If you don’t go through the process, you will not be able to communicate on the platform,” Kaufman said on Monday.
That large-scale rollout, however, drew gripes about incorrect age estimates and reports of age-confirmed accounts being resold.
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Other complaints centered on Roblox relying on a third-party service, Persona, to perform these age checks. Online-safety experts have criticized the privacy risks inherent in age-verification uploads of facial biometric data or images of government-issued IDs; in February, the chat service Discord delayed a planned global launch of age verification months after hackers exfiltrated scans of IDs stored by a firm Discord had hired to support its customer service.
Persona’s privacy policy says its “default setting is to automatically delete personal data as soon as processing is complete and an outcome has been determined.”
“Nothing is stored,” Colaco said Monday. “We hard-delete the data.”
Kaufman defended Persona’s system, saying its average age-estimation error is plus or minus 1.4 years for people under 18. “We’ve proven that they can scale,” he said, adding that Roblox is not adopting other systems, some of which would not require uploading face or credential scans. “Going from face to age is still the standard that provides the most nuance.”
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Colaco said that with this technology available, Roblox would not wait for new laws requiring its use. “We are not going to wait to be told to use that technology,” she said, adding that a more cooperative approach could also help Roblox push back against well-intentioned bills that could have problematic downstream effects.
Some states remain unpersuaded by Roblox’s child-safety moves. Last August, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill (R) sued Roblox, alleging in the complaint that the site “fails to implement basic safety controls to protect child users.” Florida, Kentucky, Nebraska, Tennessee, and Texas have since filed similar suits.
Asked what Roblox was doing to find and ban predators, a topic that Roblox executives had not mentioned earlier in the roundtable, Kaufman said the company’s efforts there were less obvious but also effective. “It’s stuff that happens behind the scenes,” he said, citing how the company’s Sentinel AI system to detect child-endangerment behavior now spots things that human moderators missed. “Seventy-five percent of the time now, it’s just our algorithms finding stuff and saying hey, this looks anomalous.”
The company open-sourced Sentinel in August for other platforms to use.
Kaufman also emphasized how Roblox intentionally limits the privacy and flexibility of its chats. “We don’t encrypt chat,” he said. “We don’t allow the sharing of images and video in chat. We monitor everything.”
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Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.
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