Where does the need for hard verification of the age come from?
My friends and I were using the internet when we were under 13 years old (although not by much), and just clicked the button to confirm that we are older than 13 (mostly on various forums), and later on the same thing with 18 years old verification screens, and we turned out alright (at least from my perspective.)
According to Roblox's S-1 filing, they want to move their customer base up from the current average age of 13. Age verification is for older users, so they can be less restricted. Roblox has a large outsourced "moderation" operation, and is working on an AI system that can bring down the ban hammer in 100ms after saying a bad word.
Tencent already does this in China. Tencent owns 49% of Roblox. So the technology is available.
> According to Roblox's S-1 filing, they want to move their customer base up from the current average age of 13.
I'm guessing that's because things like COPPA don't apply to 13+ and identity verification lets them start building accurate PII profiles for children the day they turn 13. What a nasty business.
As long as I can remember, you could attest that you’re over 13 on Roblox with zero proof and that would grant them the right to collect data anyways.
I think the goal here is to expand into 18+ where there’s less need for chat moderation (save for slurs) and game moderation, while still having a sandboxed environment where parents are comfortable letting their kids use without exposure to the 18+ content.
Given this angle I wonder if Roblox is actually hoping for rampant falsifications so they can keep their underage players but also tell regulators that they are protecting minors from possible exposure to harmful content.
Wow - I had no idea that Tencent owned that much of Roblox.
Now I'm even more wary of sending my ID to a company that's owned by another company that's owned by a repressive government and can influence how anyone in the chain can do business.
Probably parents realizing their children were making in-app purchases beyond what they (the parents) were aware of, and charging them back as unauthorized use. The cc processors pass that on to the merchant, and will drop them if there are too many. Likely Roblox just reached some critical mass where they couldn't sustain it any more.
When I read about the age verification system for Roblox, it immediately made me think of a post on the official Patreon blog from just a few days ago, talking about how they're going to have to start asking for identity verification for "adult/18+ creators" due to new standards from Mastercard. And, yes, this clearly isn't exactly the same thing, but the similarity in requirement combined with the timing make it at least fractionally more suspicious to me that this is driven by payment processor requirements -- or at the very least, whatever concerns are driving those requirements.
It's also worth pointing out that unlike Patreon's requirement for adult material creators, Roblox's verification is optional, which most of the discussion here on HN seems to be eliding.
> For now, only one feature requires age verification: Roblox's new voice chat feature. During its initial beta, it will only be available to players who verify they are at least 13 years old. But the implication seems to be that other features -- perhaps specific Roblox games or community tools -- could be age-gated as the company works to protect its relatively young user base.
Pure speculation: Once they build a user base that over time crosses the age of 18 (or whatever the age for accessing adult material is in the player's country), they can allow them access to a separate, premium, age restricted section, where they can expand their user generated content model to a demographic with a lot more money and a market where that money is easily spent.
Depending on the country, it can be due to local regulation. I don’t think it is required yet in the US
E.g. AVMS in Europe. Youtube had to implement age verification.
EDIT: @gruez: An attestion is likely no longer sufficient for Roblox's compliance requirements, and identity proofing is now cheap to perform (~$1-2/per proofing request). Cheaper to get ahead of the curve.
> For now, only one feature requires age verification: Roblox’s new voice chat feature, Spacial Voice. During its initial beta test, it will only be available to players who verify they are at least 13 years old. (Roblox didn’t say whether it would later be available to users regardless of verification status.)
> But the implication seems to be that other features — perhaps specific Roblox games or community tools — could be age-gated as the company works to protect its relatively young user base. More than half of Roblox’s users are still under 13 (Roblox says “nearly 50 percent” were over 13 as of the second quarter of the year).
> COPPA imposes certain requirements on operators of websites or online services directed to children under 13 years of age, and on operators of other websites or online services that have actual knowledge that they are collecting personal information online from a child under 13 years of age.
I didn't read the whole thing. I plan to one day though because I want to see what the rules are, but, to me, that summary sounds like the only reason you need to do it is if you want to collect personal information for children that are 13-17 year old.
Here's a wild idea... How about not collecting the personal information of children?
COPPA has a very broad definition of personal information (see https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/part-312). "Online contact information" counts as personal information, and that includes email addresses, IRC nicks, IM usernames, etc. Some other things that count as personal information under COPPA are IP addresses, the user's voice, and full names. Virtually all online services with user accounts collect personal information as defined by COPPA.
>Virtually all online services with user accounts collect personal information as defined by COPPA.
And that makes it right to do so? I think not.
Sure, it's necessary to store stuff like login credentials, if a login is required to access the site.
As such, it shouldn't matter how old (or young) you are, unless there's a specific need to store such information (and there rarely is) to support the use of whatever services are provided by a website, it's invasive and untrustworthy to do so.
And I respond accordingly.
Feel free to disagree, but that's not a discussion which will end in me changing my position.
I'm sure it's more of a "cover your ass" scenario where in the future, if someone gets past the ID verification system and uses an account to commit a crime on their platform, Roblox can just say "the ID company verified it!"
I don't think anything has changed, but COPPA isn't the only regulation with age requirements. GDPR also includes age requirement (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-8-gdpr/).
From a quick read of the article, I think this is intentionally going beyond the requirements. They obviously feel that this will build a safer and more trustworthy environment at the expense of other issues, including a loss of users who don't want to provide identity.
There are truly unsavory elements that will intrude on a virtual environment for children. Roblox corp knows exactly what they're dealing with due to their existing support requests- and they can imagine the implications of adding a spacial voice feature into that mix.
My friends and I were using the internet when we were under 13 years old (although not by much), and just clicked the button to confirm that we are older than 13 (mostly on various forums), and later on the same thing with 18 years old verification screens, and we turned out alright (at least from my perspective.)