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Roblox begins asking tens of millions of children to verify their age with a selfie
(www.engadget.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2025
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I'd be far happier if they just shut down chat under 18. The pedos will find a way to get through otherwise.
Parents can turn off chat in the parental controls. Then I found my daughter chatting using the handheld “protest signs” in game that have customizable text…
It's a losing battle, but it shows your child is clever and adaptable. You're training them well.
...and how do you verify that chatters are over 18?
Ask for verification only to enable chat. So at least in theory it's only adults.
Or, you know; don't.
i mean, to matter which way you go you'll have created a database of people's real identities. which is a problem.
Yeah but at least it wouldn't be mostly children.
did you bypass verification prompts as a child? so will they.
Yes, and Ana von mcfakenamesdottir the third, born jan1 1900 will be in the database forever.
hah.
personally i think a big part of the problem is that real-name identification for things that shouldn't need it is just sort of accepted, rather than being criticised as the massive invasion of privacy that it is. whether it includes children or not is a side note in my mind.
Oh absolutely, and we should go back to 1990s anonymity
But here we are. Everything has an endoscope.
well, we're here. but the companies and governments pushing this are already looking at possible next steps, like building systems where your real identity is used everywhere.
And part of what I want is for children to be excluded. To not be tracked. It's a good wedge that turns their rhetoric against them.
maybe. when china did it with their law about children not using their phones after curfew, they handled it by building a face database of everyone except children, then matching against that.
Still fucking awful, but more work and keeps kids a little safer than the opposite
also a very useful way to mask your true reason if your true reason is "i want to build a database of people". four horsemen of the internet type shit.
Yes but I don't think anyone but the ccp is capable of actually doing that competently at the scale of a large country. Maybe ten years ago google might've had a shot.
doing it incompetently is arguably worse, because that involves storing way too much info and sharing it too freely.
Yeah. I'm not a fan of any if this, but nobody cares when you say 'dont be evil¹'; not being pointlessly recklessly evil isn't a serious grown-up policy. better to do a political Tesla valve; introduce competing contradictory evil, dilute the propaganda, and arrest momemtym
¹except HUAC. HUAC cares.
you say that, but if that was the case why would ibm go to all that trouble to get an exclusion from the json user agreement clause "the software shall be used for good, not evil"?
Yeah they did the 30s/40s equivalent, but I don't think they still have the functional capacity to work at that scale.
they probably do, just that we don't get to hear about it until a couple of years have passed.
No like i don't think they're still competent enough. Morally, sure, thry could be that evil.
If, say, Denver needed that database, they'd do it before the check cleared.
I dont think they could do it for a large country.
They would want to, they would take the contract, ans it would hire so many subcontractors cut so many corners the end product would be unrecognizable.
i mean
Edit: sorry, reuters seems to be stripping stuff off of the link. the quote i linked to is
It takes all of them plus the Zionist state, for something smaller than California.
fair enough. i just know ibm is a big actor with many european governments as well, more so than the others. probably by virtue of having been around a lot longer.
And certain preexisting relationships.
Just send one (1) child picture.
While I don't love age verification, taking 3d webcam scans from adults won't create a catalog of kids.
edit: and to clarify, IDGAF about chat ID verifications for almost all sites, but Roblox is marketed explicitly toward and occupied by children.
no amount of age verification/id controls is stopping bad parents from failing their kids, it's a pointless waste of time which ultimately opens up these kids/people to being even more vulnerable when somebody hacks their database.
if you run a business that provides some digital entertainment service to children, and facilitates their communication while using it...the only way your stopping groomers (or just generally keeping it from turning into a cesspool) is by actually paying people to moderate the chat rooms, simple as that
and, atleast in an unregulated shithole like the US...the only way they'll do that is if they end up being held liable under some class action lawsuit
small communities like this are work because the population using it is still relatively small
either way you're creating a database of people's faces. it's gonna be handled by a third party no matter what so whether you're above or below the cutoff is just a flag.
What's stopping them from running a client model? Why even send the images home?
the fact that they want the data.
I would be willing to verify my age if it meant I didn't have to play with children.