The online games platform Roblox is to start blocking children from talking to adult and much older teen strangers from December as it faces fresh lawsuits alleging it has been exploited by predators to groom children as young as seven.
One of the world's most popular gaming platforms Roblox has reached 150 million daily players of games including viral hits Grow a Garden and Steal a Brainrot but has been hit by legal claims alleging the system’s design has made “children easy prey for paedophiles”.
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 said it would be the first online gaming or communication platform to require age checks for communication. Similar checks were introduced for users of pornography sites in the UK this summer under Online Safety Act measures to prevent under-18s from seeing explicit content.
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 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.
“We see it as a way for our users to have more trust in who the other people they are talking with are in these games,” said Matt Kaufman, Roblox’s chief safety officer. “And so we see it as a real opportunity to build confidence in the platform and build confidence amongst our users.”
Source: The Guardian
Bd-pratidin English/ ANI
