Well, THAT'S horrifying.
The kids game platform that has massive issues with grooming and child predators now wants pictures of their underage users?
Surely, nothing can go wrong.
Icon base by Lorc under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient
Well, THAT'S horrifying.
The kids game platform that has massive issues with grooming and child predators now wants pictures of their underage users?
Surely, nothing can go wrong.
Roblox didn't become a $53 billion company by respecting minors, but it's still pretty odd that the solution to child predators is making questionable demands of kids who can't give consent. Be careful when you fight monsters, I guess.
I mean, the (I think) CEO said that the predator problem on their platform "is not a problem, but an opportunity".
I know it's taken out of context, and his take was along the lines of trying to improve child safety and explore tools and way how to prevent it, but the whole interview was still pretty unhinged, and it was not a good take.
If I recall from the interview, the context was that he was being accused of not having proper controls to protect kids. He doubled down and said they did already and that predators were a business opportunity.
rest easy, they don't ask for a picture, they ask for a video.
We finally blocked Roblox entirely in our house because it was making our kids assholes. All the little "safe" user-created minigames like Steal a Brainrot were having a pretty big effect on their behavior and things that they concerned themselves about. They would get into fights about whether or not one of them had a generator that could net them absurd, meaningless values like $1.7T/s and then take those arguments offline and still argue about whose Steal a Brainrot base was better. Or whatever.
We watched an interview with the CEO of Roblox stomping on rake after rake after rake. He seemed mostly attuned to the growth of the platform and did not seem like safety was a really any sort of primary concern at all. He talked about things like this (continuuous facial recognition via the devices's human facing camera) as if that would do anything to curb the behavior of adults abusing the platform. He seemed to be saying that What else would you get but safety with changes like this? I decided that I do not like that guy in particular and I don't like his product either and my kids can have it back after they have defeated me and can figure out how the pi-hole works.
If teenager, replace "Roblox" with "Pørn" (or "Social Media," depending on location).
No Roblox in our house… I have spoken. ~Probably Kuiil
There’s never been any reason to get to this point. That it’s all been voluntary is just the most egregious abandonment of logic and parenting.
But hey - no one who’s in the swamp will ever get out.

They put kids in age categories that can't talk to each other, completely ignoring the fact that kids of different ages want to interact. I know kids with several accounts now of different "age" depending on which of their friends wants to play Roblox with them today
The future was supposed to have flying cars, what is this bullshit
With how they really didn't like those guys that were collecting data to get predators arrested this ends up sounding like it was implemented so predators know who the real kids are
This is the worst timeline