Starting this week, all Roblox users must go through a mandatory face scan if they want to interact with other players within Roblox games.
Roblox is a platform that gathers a huge number of underage users and is unfortunately also a place where various predators stalk the youngest players. After the problem of sexual predators in Roblox became public and brought a series of lawsuits, the Roblox company decided on an atypical move to protect its users.
In short, all Roblox users who want to communicate with other players on the platform through the chat option will have to from next week scan your face. Then he will automated system to estimate the user’s age and then will only allow him to communicate with a similar age group of players to which he belongs. The age groups are as follows:
- users under the age of 9 can only chat with users under the age of 12
- users aged 9-12 may communicate with users under 16
- users aged 13-15 may chat with users aged 9-17
- users aged 16 and 17 can communicate with those aged 13-20
- users 18-20 years old can chat with users 16 years old and older
- users 21 and older can communicate with those 18 and older
Locking conversations by age groups it sounds drastic, but one important thing should be noted. Namely, this only applies to conversations with unknown players. Users deemed by the system to be 13 years of age or older will still be able to chat with anyone on their friends list, or what Roblox calls “Trusted Connections.”
The big question mark in all of this is how precise will this automatic age determination system be user and whether it will be possible to deceive him somehow, for example by spoofing someone else’s picture. The system will ask the user to scan the face by looking straight into the camera, and by turning the face to the left and right. This already rules out the possibility that children will be able to use their parents’ ID cards to bypass this check.
However, Roblox says that the system is certainly not perfect – because no such system is, but that this is the first step towards safer communication of minors on that platform.