With pressure growing on to do something about its reputation as, in the recent words of Louisiana attorney general Liz Murrill, "," Roblox Corporation says it's going to expand its use of "facial age estimation technology" to everyone who uses its built-in communications systems.
Roblox said the new age estimation tech, combined with Roblox's existing ID verification and parental consent tools, "will provide a more accurate measure of a user's age than simply relying on what someone types in when they create an account." The company also [[link]] plans on rolling out new systems that will restrict communications between adults and minors unless they know each other in real life.
Roblox's facial age estimation works by analyzing a selfie to estimate your age and sort you into a rating group—under 13, 13+, or 18+—with varying restrictions for each category. This isn't a new technology: The ESRB proposed using to estimate people's ages in 2023, an idea the FTC because it was unclear exactly how the technology would work, although it left open the possibility for future adoption. Perhaps with good reason, as the tech has proven somewhat dodgy: People in the UK, for instance, were famously able to get around Discord's age verification system by using .
Still, age estimation technology is growing in popularity—Facebook recently made my mom submit a selfie to verify her account, which was a tremendous headache for a woman of a certain age who's not very computer savvy (and her son)—and some systems, like Microsoft's incoming Xbox age verification, have .
It's possible Roblox will do a better job of it as well—the company has previously claimed growing success with —although in broad strokes, 'we are training machines to evaluate and identify us with ever-greater levels [[link]] of precision and accuracy' may not strike everyone as "better" in the truest sense of the word.
Still, Roblox clearly has to do something if it wants to avoid regulatory crackdowns and potentially huge civil penalties. It has an absolutely massive audience—one recent weekend apparently saw —but it's also facing a growing backlash against a perceived inability to keep young kids away from the worst of the internet.