Key facts
- Roblox's child safety measures are insufficient, allowing adults to contact children and view their personal information, according to Australia's eSafety commissioner.
- Adult strangers could still send connection requests to children and access their contact lists without parental alerts.
- Roblox has agreed to a court-enforceable undertaking to implement stricter safeguards, including making children's accounts private by default.
- The platform will undergo independent third-party auditing of its child safety tools and age estimation technology.
- Roblox faces potential fines of up to $49.5 million under the Online Safety Act if its age estimation tools are found to be inadequate.
Australia's eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has stated that Roblox's safeguards are failing to adequately protect children from adult contact and potential exploitation. Despite implementing some changes, the platform still exhibits alarming gaps, allowing adult strangers to send connection requests, view children's profiles and contact lists, and comment on posts without parental consent.
Testing conducted by eSafety revealed that children's account information, including their connections and interests, was visible to anyone on the platform, and these requests did not trigger parental alerts. The regulator also found that adults could search children's visible contact lists for additional targets and comment on posts outside of game environments without necessary consent.
Roblox, which is used by 1.7 million Australian children, has entered into a court-enforceable agreement with eSafety to implement stricter measures within the next three months. These measures will include preventing adults from contacting children without parental consent and ensuring children's accounts are set to private by default. Roblox has also promised to improve reporting mechanisms for unwanted contact and notify users of outcomes.
Inman Grant emphasized that Roblox can no longer be trusted to independently verify its child safety tools, necessitating third-party auditing under the Online Safety Act. This is the first time such auditing has been required since the act became enforceable. The agreement follows previous warnings from eSafety regarding concerns about child exploitation on the platform.
Roblox, in response, stated that the undertaking follows constructive dialogue and recent rollouts of industry-leading safety features, including new account types for under-16s and facial age checks. The company claims to have met its commitments and will continue working towards the shared goal of online child safety. The platform's in-house facial age estimation system, which uses AI, has processed millions of age-check records, with Roblox reporting high confidence estimates and agreement with human consensus labels for adults over 80% of the time.