Well, THAT’S horrifying.
The kids game platform that has massive issues with grooming and child predators now wants pictures of their underage users?
Surely, nothing can go wrong.
Roblox didn’t become a $53 billion company by respecting minors, but it’s still pretty odd that the solution to child predators is making questionable demands of kids who can’t give consent. Be careful when you fight monsters, I guess.
I mean, the (I think) CEO said that the predator problem on their platform “is not a problem, but an opportunity”.
I know it’s taken out of context, and his take was along the lines of trying to improve child safety and explore tools and way how to prevent it, but the whole interview was still pretty unhinged, and it was not a good take.
If I recall from the interview, the context was that he was being accused of not having proper controls to protect kids. He doubled down and said they did already and that predators were a business opportunity.
rest easy, they don’t ask for a picture, they ask for a video.
Age verification is already dystopian, but why do kids need to verify their age??? Wouldn’t the logical assumption be that if you can’t verify as an adult, that they would be underage and therefore be chat limited? What purpose is there to having photo verification that someone is a child? I figured it was a poorly written headline, but the article does seem to suggest they are pointlessly collecting data on children with no explanation.
Also don’t appreciate this article acting like corporate monopolies should be more trusted with the surveillance state. It’s crazy seeing all news sites manufacturing consent for this shit so openly.
I might be dumb but doesn’t your idea just lets predators pretend to be children?
If I can’t prove I’m an adult then I must be a child. Now I get to talk to children and groom them. I’m not saying this is the best course of action but I also don’t know how best to cut down on predators on kids games.
Usually how these verification systems work is; if you cant verify, you don’t get to chat. Its supposed to lock out children from communicating with strangers online. There is no reason to verify children if the only people allowed to talk are verified adults.
I don’t know what clown shoes system Roblox has decided to go with. Again, the article doesn’t seem to specify why they are collecting children data. If the idea is to age gate chat between player demographics, so that kids can talk to other kids… that seems like a wasted effort. Children are quite capable of abusing each other without any adults around. Age verification is not an alternative to moderation.
And that’s without getting into “AI age verification is easily fooled”; kids and predators alike are going to get around the system if they bother looking into how to do so. Just as all the generations before them were constantly circumventing lazy tech solutions for blocking content when children are involved.
The CEO literally said that child predators on roblox are a good potential market they want to hit.
We finally blocked Roblox entirely in our house because it was making our kids assholes. All the little “safe” user-created minigames like Steal a Brainrot were having a pretty big effect on their behavior and things that they concerned themselves about. They would get into fights about whether or not one of them had a generator that could net them absurd, meaningless values like $1.7T/s and then take those arguments offline and still argue about whose Steal a Brainrot base was better. Or whatever.
We watched an interview with the CEO of Roblox stomping on rake after rake after rake. He seemed mostly attuned to the growth of the platform and did not seem like safety was a really any sort of primary concern at all. He talked about things like this (continuuous facial recognition via the devices’s human facing camera) as if that would do anything to curb the behavior of adults abusing the platform. He seemed to be saying that What else would you get but safety with changes like this? I decided that I do not like that guy in particular and I don’t like his product either and my kids can have it back after they have defeated me and can figure out how the pi-hole works.
- Block kids from Roblox.
- Leave one hard-to-find way around the block, and tell them it exists.
- Watch kids go insane learning all about security, privacy, and networking.
- Profit.
If teenager, replace “Roblox” with “Pørn” (or “Social Media,” depending on location).
No Roblox in our house… I have spoken. ~Probably Kuiil
There’s never been any reason to get to this point. That it’s all been voluntary is just the most egregious abandonment of logic and parenting.
But hey - no one who’s in the swamp will ever get out.
They put kids in age categories that can’t talk to each other, completely ignoring the fact that kids of different ages want to interact. I know kids with several accounts now of different “age” depending on which of their friends wants to play Roblox with them today
The future was supposed to have flying cars, what is this bullshit
With how they really didn’t like those guys that were collecting data to get predators arrested this ends up sounding like it was implemented so predators know who the real kids are
I blame parents for not boycotting this cesspit of pedophiles maintained by greedy fucks.
