From next month it will start enforcing facial age estimation to allow children to chat with strangers only if they are in their broad age group.
Roblox compared its new system to school cohorts such as elementary, middle school and high school. It will be introduced first in Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, where children will be blocked from privately chatting with adults they do not know in real life from next month, and in the rest of the world in early January.
Users will be placed into the following groups: under nine, nine to 12, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, 18 to 20, or 21 and over. Children will be able to chat only with others in their age group and similar ones. For example, a child with an estimated age of 12 will be able to chat only with under-16s. Images and video used for the checks would not be stored, Roblox said.
This. Imagine being a company who suddenly has to do the right thing simply because they can’t afford the “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas” approach any more.
Litigation may be an awful substitute for regulation, but at least its having some positive effect here.
Shame about the way they’re doing it, though. It’s a wet dream for politicians and activists in favour of age verification, and for the hackers who’ll inevitability get their hands on all of it.
I don’t know if I would call mandatory facial recognition for children online “the right thing.”
I would say it is the parent’s responsibility to know what their child is doing and what platforms their child is using. If something horrible should happen, my first finger to point at would be the parents not doing anything to prevent it, usually out of negligence, not the Roblox company. A company can only do so much before they begin to assume control of responsibilities a parent has, and I would prefer governments and businesses have as little control over raising children as possible.
This is why many parents used to restrict children’s access to the internet to only when the parent can directly monitor it until they were an adult. Sometimes a “family computer” in a common room with the screen plainly visible was the one a child could use. Sadly, it appears this is no longer the case, and more and more parents are ignorant of what their children do.
If someone’s dog eats all the pills they left out on the counter and dies, it isn’t the fault of the dog and it isn’t the fault of the medical company that made the pills, its the fault of the owner for being negligent by not watching the dog and leaving the pills out. This is my opinion.
I don’t think so either, which is why I didn’t say it. You skipped my final paragraph.
By “right thing”, I was referring to doing anything, which appears to be more than they’ve tried so far.
The parental responsibility argument was probably valid when there was 1-2 standard computers in a home and getting online was a Whole Thing in itself. Now we have supercomputers in our pockets that are permanently online. It’s a whole lot harder than a simple “parents should take responsibility” one-liner.
I’m not saying they bear no responsibility, but to hand wave that as the answer is not an answer.
Also: Thinking of myself at that age, though public internet didn’t exist until I was almost an adult, I know I’d have found ways around things. A digital equivalent to slipping out of your window to see friends or hiding your Brussels sprouts in a pocket.
The technical education required to correctly protect, monitor and configure the necessary hardware and software is unreasonable for the vast majority of people.
Though you could probably find a kid who’ll happily show you how to do it all…
I don’t agree. I think that the responsibilty a parent has to keep their child safe and teach them how to navigate reality has always been hard.
Parents in the 90s probably had as hard of a time with smartphones as parents do now with smartphones. When smartphones were brand new I remember many parents did not allow their children to have them at all, if the child even had a mobile phone. Not because they don’t love their child, but because they do. They want to protect them from having access to material children shouldn’t have. But children are smart, and they find a way around it with the iPod Touch or PSP that their friend has or other means. But in those cases the parents can say they did everything they could to protect their child.
The most fault obviously lies with the nefarious person grossly mistreating children. If they didn’t exist at all, none of this would even be necessary. Unfortunately, that cannot ever happen, because humans still do not know what causes them to be the way they are, or how to prevent it/treat it properly.
Now, Roblox certainly should be doing something about it, but the amount of fault they have in the issue is the least among other parties. But using mandatory facial recognition for that? I think that is way too far. I don’t see why DMs aren’t monitored. Seems like the perfect use case for AI: have an LLM scan DMs as they are sent and "flag"messages of potential suspicion for a human to then read the DM chain for context to verify. Or just remove messaging from the platform altogether.
Not even “can’t afford”. They’re rolling in money. They merely made the calculation that paying lip service to the problem (and farming their user base for even more data to leverage, count on it) could cost less than future lawsuits.