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Roblox Requires Age Checks for Communication, Ushering in New Safety Standard

55 points by urbanshaman

by jswelker

5 subcomments

The most impressive thing about Roblox is how many predatory parties they have managed to pack into one children's platform. The company itself with its microtransactions, cash hungry creators with lowest common denominator and/or sexualized content, creepy adults behaving badly, probably some hostile foreign governments in all likelihood. Maybe add in a 4chan integration next just to cover a wider spectrum of villainy.

by xeonmc

2 subcomments

Roblox calling themselves the industry gold standard in online safety is about as ridiculous as Riot Games calling themselves the beacon of technical excellence in game development.

by sanex

7 subcomments

I've been saying we need a separate Internet for kids. Not just because of pedos, but because young adults don't have the same level of respect and filters that one should have when dealing with kids and it's exposing them to behavior they shouldn't. This is a great step.

by crtasm

1 subcomments

So besides scanning your child's face they also want access to their phone contacts.

by samename

2 subcomments

This is deeply concerning. No parent should be letting their kids faces be scanned with this. They claim to “delete” the image a videos after the scan, but make no mistake, the signature is saved and will be used to track the child online for the rest of their life. We need to have better protections around biometrics. Surveillance is not the solution we want.

by rgregg

2 subcomments

It'd be nice if they'd do some simple common sense things - like give you a report of which games were being played and provide parental controls around which games can be played. It shocks me (but not really) that they haven't done this.

by dbg31415

1 subcomments

Remember, Roblox is toxic and exploits young people.
- Roblox Isn't a Game | Psychology Today // https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/video-game-health/20...
- Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers - YouTube // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ
- Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper. - YouTube // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY
Roblox is Darker Than You Think (ft. Ruben Sim) - YouTube // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av03P5D11PQ&t=55s

by gambiting

3 subcomments

Does that help with any of this?
https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/
"Following years of scandals, we performed our own checks to see if the platform had cleaned up its act. As a test, we attempted to set up an account under the name ‘Jeffrey Epstein’…only to see the name was taken, along with 900+ variations. Many were Jeffrey Epstein fan accounts, including “JeffEpsteinSupporter” which had earned multiple badges for spending time in kid’s games. Other Jeff Epstein accounts had the usernames “@igruum_minors” [I groom minors], and “@RavpeTinyK1dsJE” [rape tiny kids]. We attempted to set up a Roblox account under the name of another notorious pedophile to see if Roblox had any up-front pedophile screening: Earl Brian Bradley was indicted on 471 charges of molesting, raping and exploiting 103 children. The username was taken, along with multiple variants like earlbrianbradley69. After we found a username, we listed our age as “under 13” to see if children are being exposed to adult content. By merely plugging ‘adult’ into the Roblox search bar, we found a group called “Adult Studios” with 3,334 members openly trading child pornography and soliciting sexual acts from minors. We tracked some of the members of “Adult Studios” and easily found 38 Roblox groups – one with 103,000 members – openly soliciting sexual favors and trading child pornography."

by moon2

0 subcomment

Why would someone in their sound minds allow their kids to do some sort of facial age estimation made by a third-party vendor? Sounds like a great privacy-protection idea (/s).
You see, these companies leverage the lack of regulation regarding platforms. I'm not sure how one company would fight predatory users, but shifting the blame to parents or doing some techno-stuff to save the day won't do it.
We can already imagine a lot of problems with this approach – what if the vendor forgets to delete these pictures? It can be maliciously, or by sheer stupidity. What if the pictures leak at some point? Again, not every system is 100% safe from bad actors.
Last but not least – do we know if this age estimation algorithm works 100% of times? Are there studies that prove that predators won't find ways to crack this?
Also, kids in the same age group might also misbehave.

by theturtle

0 subcomment

by cohogndaaz

0 subcomment