Roblox announced today two customized accounts for young users: the Roblox Kids account for users aged 5 to 8 and the Roblox Select account for users aged 9 to 15. The two accounts will be online at the beginning of June, when content access, communication set-up and parental control functions will be adjusted more precisely according to the age of the user. In addition, Roblox will establish an ongoing screening mechanism to ensure that users under the age of 16 can play the game.
The Roblox Kids account by default disables all chat functions, and game access is limited to games with a ” minimum ” or ” light ” content maturity label. The Roblox Securet account allows for the opening of chat functions under existing rules (e.g. limiting the age difference between chat participants) and extends access to games with a ” medium ” label. Roblox will also impose new requirements on home-made games for these levels of users, including developer identification and ongoing evaluation of player use. These games cannot yet address “sensitive issues, social gatherings or free-form drawing games”. In addition, Roblox is expanding parental control to allow the prohibition or permission of specific games and directly controlling chat settings for children under 15.
In a press conference on Monday, Nicky Jackson Colaco, Vice-President of Roblox Global Public Policy, stated: “We have not only allowed but welcomed young users; we feel an additional responsibility to protect these young users.” The look of the new level of accounts will also be different, with Roblox Kids having a blue screen background. According to Matt Kaufman, Chief Security Officer Roblox, this is intended to help busy and stressful parents to monitor children ‘ s online lives. Although the Child Online Privacy Protection Act granted stricter privacy protections to users under 13 years of age, Roblox had been using technical means to verify the age of users in recent years. Last October, Roblox began requiring users to perform age validation before using chat functions; in January this year, the policy was enforced globally. However, this large-scale expansion has led to complaints about inaccurate age estimates, which have been resold through certified accounts. Other complaints focused on Roblox relying on third-party services in Persona for age verification. Cybersecurity experts have criticized the privacy risks inherent in uploading face biometric data or government-issued documents for age verification. In February this year, Discord was hacked to steal stored I.D. Several months after the presentation of the document, the original global age validation scheme was postponed.
Persona’s privacy policy states that its “default setting is the automatic removal of personal data after processing has been completed and the results have been determined”. Matt Kaufman claims that the age assessment for persons under 18 years of age was wrongly assessed in Persona ‘ s system at ±1.4 years. “We have proved that they can be modularized”, he said, adding that Roblox did not have other systems, some of which did not require face or document scanning. Some states in the United States still do not believe in Roblox child security initiatives. Last August, the Attorney General of Louisiana, Liz Muriel, indicted Roblox for “failure to implement basic security controls to protect child users”. Similar proceedings have since been instituted in Florida, Kentucky, Nebraska, Tennessee and Texas. When asked what measures Roblox was taking to identify and ban the aggressors, Matt Kaufman said that the company’s efforts in that regard were less visible but equally effective. “These are behind the scenes,” he said, for example, that the company’s Sentinel AI system, which is used to detect harm to children, can now detect what is missing from the manual auditors. “Now, in 75% of cases, our algorithms are discovering problems and suggesting that they look unusual.” Roblox opened the Sentinel source to other platforms in August.