Roblox, a popular gaming platform that has faced growing scrutiny over child safety concerns, said Tuesday it will require users to verify their age if they want to chat with other players.
To do this, people will provide ID or take a selfie through the Roblox app to prove they are as young or old as they say. The verification function estimates a person's age, which allows the company to limit communication between children and adults.
Roblox, which is used by more than 151 million people daily, said it is the first online gaming or communication platform to meet this requirement. The move comes as the San Mateo-based company faces a barrage of lawsuits alleging Roblox hasn't done enough to protect children from pedophiles and sexually explicit content.
Roblox said that once people verify their age, users will only be able to chat with other players in the same age group unless they confirm they already know the other player. For users under 9 years of age, chat features will be disabled by default unless a parent gives permission to use these tools after age verification.
“This initiative is designed to provide even more age-appropriate experiences for all users, which we believe will improve the experience for users of all ages on Roblox,” company executives said in the release. blog post about the new requirement.
Online games are a popular way for children and teenagers to communicate. In Roblox, users create or play in virtual spaces and communicate with others. Some of the platform's popular games include exploring virtual cities, planting digital crops, and caring for virtual pets.
But players also use avatars and usernames to identify themselves online, making it harder to determine a player's age.
Some lawsuits against Roblox allege that predators pretend to be children and convince minors to post sexually explicit images of themselves on the platform.
Verifying people's age is an ongoing issue on various online platforms as child safety concerns grow. But tech companies such as Meta, Google and Apple are debating whether app stores or the platforms themselves should verify users' ages.
When people sign up for Roblox, like other platforms, they provide their date of birth, but it's easy to lie about your age. However, asking people to provide their government ID or an image of their face raises privacy concerns and creates a barrier to using certain online features.
Roblox said it is partnering with San Francisco-based identity verification company Persona, which will process images and videos of people's faces. It states that the scan data will be deleted immediately. The gaming platform said that verifying your age is optional, but users will not be able to access chat features if they don't do so.
The company will begin enforcing this requirement in select countries, including Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, in the first week of December. Then, in early January, the requirement will expand to the rest of the world where Roblox's chat features are available.
