Roblox Announces Age Verification System

Fox News Radio's Jessica Rosenthal joins us to discuss a new age-verification system put in place by Roblox. 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So Roadblocks has been making a lot of headlines. It's
a gaming platform, like, there's a whole bunch of different
things that your kids can do to play on it.
And if you're giving your phone to your child to
help put an appointment in there, they know so much
more than you. So there have been some creepiness and
now there's a new age verification system on the liveline.

(00:20):
Jessica Rosenthal with Box News Radio, Jessica, thanks for doing
this today, Yeah, thanks for having me. How do you
describe Roadblocks to parents who might not know what their
kids are doing online?

Speaker 2 (00:33):
I don't even know yet. My six year old is
definitely interested. But it's a gaming platform. The people who
use it and the advocates of it call it serve
an introductory to a lot of stem topics, a lot
of geometry. You build things you can build like I guess,
entire cities or towns or whatever build. I'm not sure

(00:55):
other than not how to describe it. But kids apparently
love it. And the problem is there's a chat function
on the gaming platform, and like you just said, a
lot of creepers have found their way into the messaging
of minors. Now, Roadblock says after a lot of lawsuits

(01:16):
from parents and state's attorney general that they have a
new age verification check. If you want to use the
chat function, you need to verify your age. A lot
of kids on the age of sixteen don't have a
government ID yet, right, So this has been the issue.
This is been the problem. How do you solve for that?
So they say, now they're going to have you. If
you want to use the chat function, you have to

(01:38):
sit for like a scan of yourself. So you can't
just hold up a picture of a twelve year old
and say this is me. It has to show like
you moving. The kid has to be moving. And they
take this a third party called PERSONA uses AI to
establish the age. They think you are, thirteen, fourteen, whatever.

(02:00):
That They tell roadblocks, okay, we think this kid is twelve.
Now that kid is put into an age bucket. They
can only chat with kids in their age range, so
nine to twelve year olds, thirteen to fifteen, sixteen to eighteen,
and so on. This will obviously not only in their minds,
protects the you know, keep the kid from talking to
kids outside their age range, but because of that live scan,

(02:23):
it will keep you know, a crapy forty year old
from you know, trying to fake that he can fit
into one of these age buckets. Obviously, there's as you
might imagine, I'm sure you this is the first thing
that people think of is the privacy issue. I don't
want my thirteen year old kids, you know, having their
face scanned by anybody, really, to be honest, they say,

(02:45):
we get it. PERSONA deletes all data. So theoretically, even
if they were hacked, the hacker wouldn't come across like
a trove of you know, scans of children. Even if
some parents you know, are still uncomfortable, they say they
think this is probably the best way forward, and they
really do think that other platforms are going to start
using this. That they really just sort of needed the

(03:06):
nudge from one big platform to say, Okay, we're doing this.

Speaker 1 (03:11):
That's interesting. Got to be better than are you eighteen
and you know anybody?

Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
Jessica Rosenthal with Fox News Radio, great stuff, Thanks for
your time this morning.

Speaker 2 (03:22):
Thank you