Roblox must make changes after failing to block adults creeping on kids

Key Highlights

• 7 million Australian kids use--has entered a court-enforceable agreement to make changes in the next three months.
• 5 million.
• ” The system so far has “processed 338 million age-check records to help Roblox users unlock age-appropriate chat and access age-appropriate games on the platform,” Roblox reported.
• ” “More than 99 percent remain in the same broad age band on consecutive days,” Roblox said.
• Further, tests that compared the model “against independent ground truth produced by trained human reviewers through our Trust and Safety workflows” showed that “the model’s age-band estimate agrees with the human consensus label for adults more than 80 percent of the time,” Roblox said.

Enough is enough?

Roblox is first platform to submit to independent audits under the Online Safety Act.

Despite making changes last fall to help block adults from messaging unknown children, Roblox is still failing to stop adults from creeping on kids in other ways, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, said on Thursday.

Suspecting that Roblox may not be doing enough to stop child exploitation, eSafety conducted testing earlier this year that flagged alarming gaps in Roblox safeguards.

The agency found that adult strangers could still send connection requests to kids, whose “profiles and biographies, including account names, number and names of connections, avatar images, and non-sensitive biographical information such as their interests were visible to anyone on the Roblox platform, with no option to restrict the visibility of this information.

” Such requests did not trigger parental alerts, eSafety found, and bad actors could also search kids’ visible-to-anyone contact lists for more targets.

Perhaps even more concerning, adults could also search for kids and comment on their posts “without parental or carer consent” in “forums outside game environments,” eSafety said.

Australia’s Online Safety Act requires that platforms prevent unwanted contact between adults and minors.

It also mandates setting children’s accounts to private by default.

Although Roblox “believes it is meeting its obligations,” the online gaming platform--which 1.

7 million Australian kids use--has entered a court-enforceable agreement to make changes in the next three months.

Upcoming measures will prevent adults from contacting kids without parental consent across the platform, Roblox has promised.

Providing better protections for kids starts with “strengthening the account settings of children’s accounts so they are private by default,” eSafety said, and ends with Roblox making it easy to report unwanted contact and notifying users of outcomes after reports are made.

Those are critical protections for Australia’s second most popular online game for kids, Inman Grant said.

“We want to ensure that any platform with a high preponderance of kids to be a safe place where they can enjoy the benefits of online gaming, creativity, and connection, including building their own worlds and experiences online,” Inman Grant said.

“But those benefits can only be realized when effective safeguards are in place to protect children from serious harms such as grooming, child sexual exploitation, sextortion, or recruitment into violent extremism.

Additionally, Inman Grant said that the regulator’s testing suggested that Roblox can no longer be trusted to independently verify that its child safety tools are compliant with Australian laws. Moving forward, Roblox cannot “mark their own homework,” Inman Grant said, adding that the platform has agreed to third-party auditing.

Roblox is likely hoping that allowing the audits will demonstrate that it is going further than other companies to protect kids. In January, the company announced that it would become the first large online gaming platform to require facial age checks. Such biometric age checks have proved controversial, unpopular with users, and alarming to privacy advocates, who see even the latest age verification tools as flawed. And while Roblox says it usually automatically deletes selfies submitted for age verification, it may retain that data for up to 30 days, leaving it open to potential breaches.