At this point, I kind of have to feel sorry for Roblox. The company came under increasing criticism for failing to adequately protect children, and then courted even greater controversy when it started requiring children as young as nine years old to submit a video selfie for age verification.
The latest development in the saga is that the age verification process appears to be failing badly, with the company saying that you can’t expect everything to work on day one …
Roblox age verification
Following growing criticism that the app was putting children at risk, Roblox introduced an age verification process . The company said it would do this to limit communication between adults and children in chat.
The new feature got a partial launch in December of last year before being rolled out globally this month.
In theory, Roblox offers a choice between age verification based on photo ID and AI age estimation from a video selfie. The reality, however, is that few young children have government-issued photo ID, and so need to go the video selfie route.
While the company told us that the video selfies are only required for access to chat features, and are deleted after the checks are complete, many parents were extremely unhappy about the requirement.
Process is ‘a complete mess’
Wired took a look at how well the process is working and described the results as “a complete mess.” Players, developers, and parents alike are unhappy, and the system simply isn’t doing the job it was designed to do.
The site found that the AI system was identifying children as adults, adults as children, and that predators can buy accounts which have been age-verified as children for as little as $4.
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