Roblox to use facial age estimation on children before allowing them to access chat

From January, all users will be put into age groups to determine who they can communicate with on the platform, to stop potentially inappropriate conversations between children and adults.

A third of the site’s 150 million daily users are under the age of 13.

The technology, which is being rolled out globally, will ask for a live video from a device to estimate a person’s age, which Roblox officials have described as being ‘pretty accurate’.

The video will then immediately be deleted, they say, and will not be stored.

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People who refuse to verify their age, will be blocked from using the chat function completely, but will still be allowed to engage in games.

Matt Kauffman, chief safety officer at Roblox, told reporters: “We believe this is something that is a first for a company in the gaming, social media and messaging space, to require explicit age estimation before anybody has access to communication.

“We have a lot of teens and pre-teens on our platform and that brings its own challenges. As teenagers you have growing independence, you’re accountable for more things in your life, you have your own devices and you constantly move back and forth between apps.

“And while you do that, you’re predisposed to taking more risky behaviours, it’s just part of human development. So knowing those users are on our platform, this is how Roblox is thinking about keeping them safe.

“We don’t allow users to share images or videos when they’re chatting with each other on Roblox and we monitor all communication that’s happening. We don’t encrypt our communication and we constantly have algorithms that are constantly looking for what we call critical harms.

“Using age checks will also determine who is on the platform and how old they are. And we want to take our own learnings and investments and share them with the rest of the industry because it’s only if the entire industry is safer that we can really make kids and teens safer.”

According to Roblox, 6.1 billion messages are sent through the site’s chat function every day.

Age verification will place people in one of six groups: Under 9, 9-12, 13-15, 16-17, 18-20 or 21+.

Users will then only be able to speak to people in a ‘similar age group’ as them, Roblox says, giving the example of someone aged 12 being blocked from communicating with players over 16.

Last month, messaging platform Discord revealed the official ID photos of around 70,000 users may have been leaked after a cyber attack.

They had been collected as part of the app’s age verification process.

And concerns have been raised about live facial age estimation technology being exploited by people, using fake images to get around it.

Responding to questions about its safety, Mr Kauffman, from Roblox, said: “When we collect those images and the video that we use to determine age, immediately after - which is nearly instantaneous - we delete those images and we do not store them. Our partner does not store them either.

“Privacy is very important for our users and obviously being a platform that’s had kids and teens on it for a very long time, privacy is something that we focus on a lot and we’ve built in a lot of systems to address that.

“And with people raising questions about using another person’s picture to get around the system, I’d say the systems have fairly robust fraud checks in place to make sure the person is live and looking for other anomalies like people trying to use the same face over and over again.

“We’re being serious about trying to make sure this is something that people cannot get around, however no system is perfect and that’s why we have lots of other safety measures in place on the platform.

“And we may decide over time that we may go back and ask you to do an age estimation again.”