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The
moves come as the popular gaming platform continues to face
criticism and lawsuits over child safety and a growing number of
states and countries are implementing age verification laws.
The company had previously announced the age estimation tool,
which is provided by a company called Persona, in July. It
requires players to take a video selfie that will be used to
estimate their age. Roblox says the videos are deleted after the
age check is processed. Users are not required to submit a face
scan to use the platform, only if they want to chat with other
users.
Roblox doesn’t allow kids under 13 to chat with other users
outside of games unless they have explicit parental permission —
and unlike different platforms, it does not encrypt private chat
conversations, so it can monitor and moderate them.
While some experts have expressed caution about the reliability
of facial age estimation tools, Matt Kaufman, chief safety
officer at Roblox, said that between the ages of about five to
25, the system can accurately estimate a person's age within one
or two years.
“But of course, there’s always people who may be well outside of
a traditional bell curve. And in those cases, if you disagree
with the estimate that comes back, then you can provide an ID or
use parental consent in order to correct that,” he said.
After users go through the age checks, they will be assigned to
age groups ranging from under nine, nine to 12, 13 to 15, 16 to
17, 18 to 20 and over 21. Users will then be able to chat with
their age group or similar age groups, depending on their age
and the type of chat.
Roblox said it will start enforcing age checks in Australia, New
Zealand, and the Netherlands in the first week of December and
the rest of the world in early January.
A growing number of tech companies are implementing verification
systems to comply with regulations or ward off criticism that
they are not protecting children. This includes Google, which
recently started testing a new age-verification system for
YouTube that relies on AI to differentiate between adults and
minors based on their watch histories. Instagram is testing an
AI system to determine if kids are lying about their ages.
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