Everything to Know About Roblox's New Safety Features (Especially If You Have a Teen!)
Roblox is becoming more like Discord and leveraging the kind of "age recognition" technology that's likely to be all over the internet soon.
This week, Crossplay attended a presentation by Roblox about new safety features launching today. These changes are mostly targeted at teenagers, but in addition to notably reflecting the company’s attitude towards its relationships with parents and children, some changes will impact anyone using Roblox, whether they’re 13 or 31.
The most notable additions include:
“Friends” are now called “Connections” across all users
“Trusted Connections” is a deeper friend category for users ages 13 and older, wherein users can engage in unfiltered voice chat (aka you can fuckin’ swear!)
Unfiltered does not mean unmoderated; it’s monitored for predatory behavior
Stricter requirements are in place for ages 13-17 to connect with an 18+ user
“Age Estimation” is Roblox leveraging a technology for users to take pictures within the Roblox app, wherein Roblox then determines which age range you’re in
The ESRB caused a stir when it was discussing similar technology last year
Teens now have access to a Do Not Disturb mode, the ability to control who can tell you’re online, insight and control over their own screen time, and more
The new parental controls in Roblox for younger kids are available in a modified form for teens, where they can share insight into their screen time and spending
There is, naturally, much more to discuss and unpack below.
“When you think about safety, you have to think about a multi-tiered approach to keeping people safe on the platform and making the platform civil,” said Roblox chief safety officer Matt Kaufman during the presentation. “There is no silver bullet that makes something safe online.”
That’s true, of course, but not without plenty of caveats.
Roblox does not have to exist, Roblox was created—and continues to see great stock market success—because it makes extraordinary amounts of money. It also can bring children a great amount of joy, but that responsibility invites and demands criticism. You do not get to capture the eyeballs and capital of children without due attention.
It was a comment that felt meant to disarm, or acknowledge, the flurry of questions that would later come from the press attending the presentation, in which many asked pointed questions about how much this raised the floor on overall safety on Roblox.
tl;dr: hopefully?
It was also interesting to hear why certain features are deemed “for teens.” What is the distinction between 12 years old and 13 years old child? Why does one get a feature?
“This gets back to our partnerships that we have with child development experts and different agencies around the world,” said Kaufman in response to a question from Crossplay. “We do spend a lot of time, even with our internal staff, where we have experts in place to help us understand maturity levels. I'll be honest, we draw guidance from both laws and what is allowed on the online and also our experts to make these determinations.”
Now, a few thoughts and smaller details on the three pillars of new announcements.
Trusted Connections
A “Trusted Connection" is where Roblox users between the ages of 13 and 17 can engage in unfiltered text and voice chat. It’s Roblox chasing Discord, to a degree. A “Connection” becomes a “Trusted Connection” if two people in that age category agree to advance the relationship. For anyone between the ages of 13 and 17 to chat with a user 18 years or older, they have to share a QR code or import a phone number.
Roblox claims it can prevent users from taking a screen shot and sharing the QR code.
Parents are not informed when a “Trusted Connection” is made, which feels like a potential mistake when talking about a 13-year-old adding an 18-year-old as a contact.
“We really try and make sure that the tools we offer users and their parents are the right ones for them, for where they are at that age,” said Roblox product manager Dina Lamdany in response to a question from Crossplay. “When we think about teens, we really know that they're experimenting with a lot more independence, and it's really a moment where it's important for them to learn the skills that they need to be safe online. The model that we have is that we provide parents with insights, and that teens can invite their parents to link to get access to a dashboard of insights, and that we hope that those really facilitate conversations between parents and teens that help teens learn "‘Okay, how should I be acting on Roblox? Who are the right people for me to be talking to?’”
I don’t have a teen (yet). I don’t know what our privacy conversations will be like, and I want to say that I’ll have the grace to respect their privacy while online. You can, thankfully, see what “Trusted Connections” your teen has via parental controls.
“We won't be notifying parents proactively right now,” said Lamdany. “We are really excited to hear feedback from teens and from parents after launch, and we'll continue to iterate on the tools that we provide parents of teens over time in the same way that we've been iterating on the tools that we provide parents of users under 13.”
In other words, it could change. We’ll see.
What’s important about Trusted Connections, however, is that it’s an attempt by Roblox to keep young people on the platform. A cautious response relies on you trusting Roblox to maintain a safe platform, but even in a world where Roblox became buttoned up, if two people jump from Roblox to Discord, you’re now relying on the other platform to do the job of monitoring if those conversations are safe. It’s complex.
(The company made this specific point a few times in the presentation.)
When these conversations happen, Roblox claims they are “unfiltered” but “monitored” using AI tools to scan conversations and “thousands” of actual people.
To quote the company:
Proactive Monitoring: Even with greater communication freedom, all conversations on Roblox, including those between Trusted Connections, remain proactively monitored for critical harm (e.g., grooming) to provide a safe and positive experience.
Age Estimation
Some version of this is probably coming to much of the internet in the near-ish future.
The social network Bluesky is going to roll out age identification in the UK, for example, and they won’t be alone. It’s largely targeted at pornographic websites in the United States at the moment, but my gut tells me large portions of the internet, at least in most states, will have similar requirements. It becomes a question of privacy and what powers you’re placing in the hands of officials who might wield it for harm.
Hard to say much about this feature without trying it myself or trying it with my kids.
If, for some reason, you don’t want to have your child take photos (understandable), it’ll later be possible to have a parent approve enabling Trusted Connection features (that option is not available when these launch) or scan an ID (which is available now).
“All of the biometric data that's handled when someone completes the facial age estimation flow is handled securely in partnership with Persona [an ID verification company],” said Roblox principal product manager for social products Ryan Ebanks during the presentation, “and the biometric data will be deleted within 30 days after collection, except for a few exceptions where legally required.”
Privacy and Well-being Tools
It seems fine—good, even—for users to get reports and insight into how they’re using Roblox. But one of the funnier additions the ability for a teenager to set a screen time limit on how much they’re using Roblox. Maybe I haven’t met enough teens, but how many teenagers do you know are going to set a screen time limit for themselves? 🤔
There’s one drum beat I want to start making with features like this, though.
Most of these features require parents to be proactive and check the app or website. (You can access the information through both, thankfully.) I wish more companies, whether it’s Roblox or Nintendo, sent detailed reports about what your kid was up to. If their primary platform is Roblox, send me a report once per week that summarizes what they’re up to. Otherwise, the tools are left for parents to set a reminder about.
So, Is Roblox Better?
Some parents will never trust Roblox. I get it.
It’s reasonable to say “no,” whether it’s Roblox or something else. But for the many parents who have children on Roblox, more tools are good, more scrutiny on the ways the company is saying it’s trying to protect its users is good. But the question of whether these are good or enough is an open question. But every step can be helpful.
Have a story idea? Want to share a tip? Got a funny parenting story? Drop Patrick an email.
With how Roblox devs push users to Discord, it makes me wonder how difficult it will be for Roblox to prevent that from a safety perspective. Most games have a Discord link on the game page encouraging users to go to them for codes, support, community interaction, etc. Not to put all of the responsibility on Roblox, but it's especially tough when it's on the devs who may not know how to handle it.
I wonder if Roblox has documentation or advice on moderation off Roblox. Either way, I'm glad you brought that up.
"When we think about teens, we really know that they're experimenting with a lot more independence, and it's really a moment where it's important for them to learn the skills that they need to be safe online."
I find this enraging coming from a software company. They know there are adults using gaming spaces like Roblox to exploit and abuse children. It's the company's responsibility to protect children - not to push that responsibility off onto the child themselves or their parents who may be completely unaware of what their child is doing online.
My 9 year old doesn't play Roblox but he has asked about being friends with random strangers on Fortnite a few times already. I've always said no, even though both voice and text chat are disabled. As a family we have lots of conversations about online safety and I know I can't protect or monitor him forever, so he does need to learn those skills. I just don't want to hear that from a company that is making money out of a gaming community where harm has already been caused!