From next month it will start enforcing facial age estimation to allow children to chat with strangers only if they are in their broad age group.
Roblox compared its new system to school cohorts such as elementary, middle school and high school. It will be introduced first in Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, where children will be blocked from privately chatting with adults they do not know in real life from next month, and in the rest of the world in early January.
Users will be placed into the following groups: under nine, nine to 12, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, 18 to 20, or 21 and over. Children will be able to chat only with others in their age group and similar ones. For example, a child with an estimated age of 12 will be able to chat only with under-16s. Images and video used for the checks would not be stored, Roblox said.
I don’t allow my kids to play it. It sucks, but the reality is the game has been captured by pedos. I saw too many questionable things when I watched them play. Invariably they will be unsupervised at some point, even for brief periods, so it is not worth the risk.
How are they talking to people? My kid either hasn’t figured it out or doesn’t give a shit. But he doesn’t really talk except for IRL friends on discord.
See, what I figured out is that I don’t have to let my son play Roblox. Sure, he might be the “weird” one who’s dad doesn’t let him. But he was going to be “weird” anyway. That’s just how our lives work.
Plus you have AuADHD, having it myself, it makes you vulnerable to predators in ways you can’t understand yet.
We play by the same rule, everyone is weird, no judgement for immutable characteristics. Everyone has challenges, life is already hard, no reason to make it harder for someone.
Hey there’s maybe tens of us! Hello fellow reasonable parent!
FINALLY a good parent!
Please have more babies!
I would happily have more babies as children are fun.
Unfortunately that requires a partner who values intelligence, child development, learning and desires children. When I find such a unicorn I’ll make as many babies as I can reasonably raise (probably like 2 or three more maximum)
From next month it will start enforcing facial age estimation to allow children to chat with strangers only if they are in their broad age group.
This is going to backfire spectacularly, what idiots.
Right on its face, is it even legal to collect head shots of minors? I know US privacy laws are a joke but there’s usually some carve outs that protect minors.
It’s illegal to collect ANY data from children under 13. Facial scans are WAY worse than the anonymized use stats those laws were put in place to block
Can’t protect them too much, though. Otherwise, how would the pedo-in-chief and his ilk get a fresh crop of sex slaves?
Ais gonna be like you look mature for your age putting ppl higher or lower
No, no. It makes perfect sense from an investment standpoint. Their actual target audience would love to be able to pay for access to that catalog.
Problem: the game is getting a notoriety for being infested by pedophiles and the developers are actively protecting them.
Solution: send your photographs to the game infested by pedophiles to prove you are a real child!
Fucking. Incredible. If this was written in a manuscript, it would be tossed for being too cartoonishly unrealistic.
Do you have a better idea?
Absolutely! Multiple, in fact. In order of preference:
- Shut down the game, dissolve the company, and donate all remaining funds to a women’s shelter.
- Prosecute groomers instead of banning and threatening the people who are trying to stop the fuckers and crying about vigilantism even when the proper reporting channels are used.
- Use AI for a beneficial purpose at least one goddamn time. Scan the text and voice communications (it’s a public game, there is no expectation of privacy), flag suspicious exchanges for human review, then ban and report groomers.
Honestly, getting rid of any chat (voice/text) and DM features would would help. I don’t think kids should completely lose online gaming, just make it almost impossible to communicate with anyone on said game. I played a shit ton of Mario Kart and Splatoon online as a kid, but neither of those games offer personal messages/chat features (unless you set them up via app), so I imagine grooming would be almost impossible.
I don’t want to take Roblox away from kids, as I understand how fun it was growing up, especially if you can’t afford a console/games at home. But chat has to be either heavily moderated, or just entirely removed imo.
Hiring moderators would be a good option too
With what money? They only made $1.3 billion this quarter! Won’t anyone think of the shareholders?!
Them having an office large enough to moderate in-game communications, on every popular language? They have some billions to spare. Serving kids requires a lot of work they have neglected for a very long time.
Facebook was a vehicle for hateful, genocidal messages in Myanmar, and they seemingly got of the hook having no person understanding local language on the market they occupied.
If Roblox primarily targets kids, they can’t go without agressive moderation, psy-help on demand, things one would find obvious, but these are never required, not to say it’s not that sexy as getting profits and cutting corners.
I don’t know if their business model would be viable if they started things right from the beginning, but it would be more stressful to them to finally start doing something about that.
Emote only chat
I wouldn’t be complaining about this, except I am because Roblox is operated by pedos.
Something extreme measures such as face recognition has to be taken to ensure problems like this won’t happen again. However, though, pedophiles having access to data storage containing such verifications can go so wrong on so many levels.
So heres what they should do:
Fire and prosecute all of the pedos. Replace the pedos with trustworthy people to operate Roblox. Then go through verifying.
Option 2…shut down roblox. It doesn’t NEED to exist.
I like this option best, tbh.
I don’t get the appeal, really. It’s just a lego-looking ripoff where the arms are fucking huge and everything. The things that get chosen to be popular, says a lot about people’s collective tastes sometimes.
“Guess we arent allowed internet privacy after all everybody. Dont worry, its for the children.”
Recognized as [teen]
God forbid they just shut down the chat function??? Ffs
That would be stupid, many games rely on chat and aren’t exclusively played by children
You are correct, Pedophiles also play.
and? Why do you want to enable pedos?
This argument is just silly.
>Uses an iOS device
>Wants to be able to install third-party apps
>“Why do you want to be able to allow viruses?”
This isn’t about sideloading. This is about adults mingling with children on Roblox. Interesting how you miss the point so thoroughly.
If this isn’t bait, congrats, you just missed the entire point of the analogy.
While we’re at it, let’s remove commenting and posting from Lemmy for people that aren’t administrators.
If Lemmy was a child’s game and it was full of pedophiles actively grooming them then yes we would need to shut it down. Your analogy misses the point completely.
We’re are dealing with a child’s game where pedophiles are actively going after youth right now as we type.
They should be shutdown and charges pressed against the developers for allowing this. This is the only way forward at this point.
Your point about taking away chat ruining the game is also nonsensical. Only some RP would be affected and could be gotten around easily with a dialogue tree.
Word games? Multiplayer competitive games?
It’s not just a roleplaying game.
Despite being pretty important to the gameplay, should the developers of other games primarily played by underaged people be forced to ban chat? Like other bigger multiplayer games like Fortnite, Among Us, Valorant, CSGO, etc.
rofl you are beyond a pathetic joke. Congratulations on being a pile of shit so incapable of articulating a point. You are genuinely stupid beyond words.
You vulgar little maggot.
You are a canker. A sore that won’t go away. I would rather kiss a slug than be seen with you. You’re a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.
You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beast who sired you and then killed himself in recognition of what he had done. Your daddy was a bastard, your mamma was a whore, and you wouldn’t be here if the rubber hadn’t tore. I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you.
You have all the appeal of a booger. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell?
You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood.
May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs. You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You’re a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Sheep won’t have sex with you––only trash such as yourself.
You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot.
And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake?
You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile, one-handed, slack-jawed, drooling, meatslapper. On a good day you’re a half-wit. You remind me of drool.
You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of a used condom. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go. You smarmy lagerlout git. You bloody woofter sod. Bugger off, pillock. You grotty wanking oik artless base-court apple-john. You clouted boggish foot-licking twit. You dankish clack-dish plonker. You gormless crook-pated tosser. You churlish boil-brained clotpole ponce. You cockered bum-bailey poofter. You craven dewberry pisshead cockup pratting naff. You gob-kissing gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb. You dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted clapper-clawed flirt-gill.
You are a fiend and a coward, and you have toe jam. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away forever.
I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid, so stupid it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I’m sorry. I can’t go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me.
After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don’t have enough strength left.
So, Roblox is shutting down? The entire thing is a child sex crime, so unless they’re shutting down, nothing has changed
after string of lawsuits.
This. Imagine being a company who suddenly has to do the right thing simply because they can’t afford the “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas” approach any more.
Litigation may be an awful substitute for regulation, but at least its having some positive effect here.
Shame about the way they’re doing it, though. It’s a wet dream for politicians and activists in favour of age verification, and for the hackers who’ll inevitability get their hands on all of it.
Not even “can’t afford”. They’re rolling in money. They merely made the calculation that paying lip service to the problem (and farming their user base for even more data to leverage, count on it) could cost less than future lawsuits.
But asking them to verify their age via selfie. We live in the worst time line.
Come on, it’s not like anybody can just create a unique selfie of a kid. They’d have to be artists or something. /s
Company profiting from allowing pedos to groom children enacts steps to prevent pedos from grooming children? Like that’s going to happen.
Whatever solution they come up with, I can guarantee that it “accidentally” has a loophole in it.
