Roblox unveiled a suite of new safety tools to improve trusted communications on the popular gaming platform, including using AI to estimate a teen’s real age.
The new features include Trusted Connections, where users 13 and older can connect and chat more freely with people they know and trust, fostering positive interactions. This is an exceedingly important issue, as Roblox has 97.8 million daily active users, and many of them are young. Roblox has to protect them from predators and other threats.
In a press briefing, Matt Kaufman, Roblox chief safety officer, said, “Every day we have about 98 million users coming to Roblox from 180 different countries, and they’re coming to Roblox to spend time with their friends, their family. They play games, and they hang out in various experiences. And these experiences and games are all built by our community.”
He said there are over six million active experiences on the platform, and they’re being updated and added to all the time. And 60% of the users are over 13.
Roblox also introduced age estimation, a technology that helps confirm users’ ages and unlocks Trusted Connections for them.
The company also has new privacy and well-being tools, where users will have more ways to manage notifications, screen time, and privacy.
And there are tools offering insights for parents of teens, enabling transparency into their teen’s Roblox experience, including spend notifications, insight into who their teen is connected with, and screen-time stats.
Kaufman said, “We think about safety on Roblox. This is something that’s been part of the Roblox DNA since the company’s inception, almost 20 years ago. And what makes Roblox truly unique is that Roblox was built from the beginning for a platform for kids and teens to spend time together,” Kaufman said. “This is not a platform that was built for adults and then retrofitted to try and make it work for kids and teens, and because of that, safety has been built in from the very beginning.”
The role of AI and people
“That’s automated content moderation for all the content that’s uploaded to the platform, and also interventions where we keep conversations on the platform safe. Given our scale, the nearly 100 million users, we have to make extensive use of AI,” he said.
The product team has a core safety team here, and then thousands of people around the world who are working 24/7 to keep the platform safe, he said.
“They’re doing things like, in addition to building the platform that we’re talking about, they’re training our AI models. They’re handing handling appeals from our users, and they’re handling the complex safety decisions that we have to make that AI cannot always do,” Kaufman said.
To solve some problems, human investigators are needed and they’re another tier of the system. The company also partners with parental advocacy groups, mental health organizations, governments and law enforcement agencies, and they provide the company with valuable feedback that feeds into how it builds the product and how it define policies, and it’s an integral part of keeping the platform safe, he said.
Kaufman said, “When you think about safety, you have to think about a multi-tiered approach to keeping people safe on the platform and making the platform civil. There is no silver bullet that makes something safe online. So when we think about our multi-tiered approach, it starts with our policies. The foundation of our policies are our community standards, and those standards define what is acceptable on the platform.”
He added, “And from a standards perspective, our standards are some of the most restrictive in the industry. For example, we don’t allow profanity. We don’t allow people talking about sex and dating and content related to that — drugs, alcohol, things like that — are not allowed on the platform for the vast majority of our users, those who are not over 17.”
The product also has a lot of automated systems to keep everybody safe, he said.
Trusted Connections
Roblox users connect with people they already know in real life, and with players they meet in Roblox experiences. To better reflect how Roblox users connect and interact, it’s renaming Friends to Connections across the platform. And building on this, Roblox is introducing Trusted Connections for eligible users 13 and older.
Age Estimation unlocks access to Trusted Connections, enabling age-verified Trusted Connections to chat without filters.
To provide additional safeguards between people who’ve met on platform and are further apart in age, teens aged between 13 and 17 can only add adult users (18+) they know in real life as Trusted Connections, using a QR scan or Contact Importer.
Furthermore, all conversations on Roblox, including between Trusted Connections, continue to be proactively monitored for harm, including potential signs of grooming, to provide a safe, positive experience. The QR code scan has to happen live.
Ryan Ebanks, principal product manager for social products at Roblox, said Trusted Connections is a new category at Roblox, where users can communicate more freely in chat and voice communication with people they already know. It unlocks chat without filters allows people to use their party voices. Users will be able to add their real-life friends as trusted connections using a contact importer, or by scanning their Roblox QR code, with more options coming soon.
Users have to be verified as 13-plus to use Trusted Connections. And they have to pass the age estimation technology test to unlock features.
“This makes Roblox the only major platform that will require age verification, like facial age estimation in order to use private voice or unfiltered chat,” Ebanks said. “For enhanced safety, we’re introducing a new paradigm around communication between teens and 18-plus users. Teens, 13 to 17 can only add 18-plus users who they know in real life as trusted connections, which they can confirm through a QR code scan or contact importer.”
And he said that all conversations on Roblox, including those between Trusted Connections, remain proactively monitored for critical harms to make sure the company is providing a safe and positive experience for users.
The interesting thing is that I heard about this before from another small company, Guardian Gamer, which uses a cloud gaming overlay that a parent can control to govern a child’s online connections and gameplay on platforms such as Roblox. Guardian Gamer even uses AI to create a highlight of a teen’s day on Roblox for the parent to review. Roblox said they were not familiar with Guardian Gamer.
How age estimation works
Roblox is investing in age estimation technology to help deliver tailored and developmentally appropriate experiences, while aiming to protect its community from those who might seek to do harm. To add contacts as a Trusted Connection, users must be 13 and over and confirm their age using a video selfie, which is analyzed against a large, diverse dataset to estimate their age.
“We know teens want more freedom to chat more freely with their friends. We believe that
unfiltered chat should only be made available to users who have been age checked, which is why we’re using new Age Estimation tools to unlock access to Trusted Connections for those 13 and over. We believe this additional freedom to chat more openly will reduce the incentive for teens to move interactions off platform, where they may be exposed to greater risk,” said Kaufman.
Users who are over 13 and want to access to access Trusted Communications can confirm their age by taking a video selfie, which is analyzed against a large data set. The system will estimate the user’s age and assign an age group to the Roblox account. Users will always have backup options to confirm their age, such as ID verification, incoming Zoom, and verified parental consent.
The biometric data that is handled when someone completes the facial age estimation is handled securely in a partnership with Persona, and the biometric data is deleted 30 days after collections, except in cases where it is legally required. Roblox does not allow users to upload or share personal photos or videos of themselves in chat.
Privacy and well-being tools
To balance independence with safety, Roblox is introducing a new suite of tools designed to empower teens to manage their digital lives confidently, including Online Status Controls, Do Not Disturb Mode, and Screen-Time Insights and Controls. Valuable partners, including Roblox’s Teen Council and Trust and Safety Advisory Board, helped shape these initiatives.
“Teens care as much about their space, privacy, and well-being as adults do, so I love that
Roblox is now giving teens as well as parents greater control over the quality of their digital time,” said Anne Collier, founder of the Net Family Collaborative and a member of Roblox’s Safety Advisory Board, in a statement.
Roblox also quoted a Roblox teen council member named Denver H., who said, “I love that Roblox is giving us simple, effective tools to manage our time and protect our peace and well-being online; it makes a real difference in how I feel after gaming. It’s empowering to know a platform like Roblox really cares about its users.”
Dina Lamdany, senior product manager is the head for user settings, parental controls and the new digital well-being tools.
She said that among the tools that teens have access to for privacy and well-being is the “Do Not Disturb” mode. Do Not Disturb mode allows you to set a window during which to silence push notifications on your phone. If you turn on this feature, the default window is 10 p.m. to 7 a.m.
The second new well being tool is opening up screen time insights to all users above 13. The users above 13 are also able to set daily screen time limits on their own account, the same way that parents of users under 13 are able to set limits on the account of their child.
“Finally, we’ve heard directly from teens that they’re really nervous about being too visible online, and so we’ve built online status visibility controls so that users can select who’s able to see when they’re online on Roblox,” Lamdany said. “We hope that users of all ages will use these tools to feel more in control of their Roblox experience both when it comes to their own digital well-being and also when it comes to their privacy.”
Insights for parents of teens
Last year, Roblox introduced expanded parental controls for parents of users under 13. Now, Roblox is extending this commitment to empower parents of teens with tools providing transparency into their child’s experience on Roblox.
Teens can now invite their parents to set up a linked Roblox account to share visibility into who they are connected to, how much time they spend on Roblox, and in which experiences.
Parents can opt to receive high-spending alerts or notifications when their teen makes certain transactions on Roblox.
The launch of these new tools redefines digital safety and civility with industry-leading, age
informed communication.
“Last November, we redesigned the family experience for parents of kids under 13. We began to offer parents of users under 13 the ability to link their own account to that of their child and get access to comprehensive parental controls,” Lamdany said.
“In April, we built on this foundation by offering parents of users under 13 three additional tools to customize their child’s experience. Now we’re going to be offering a suite of tools for parents of users above 13, of teenagers, ages 13 to 17, and we hope that these tools will play a key role in helping ensure that teens using these new, trusted connection features stay safe on the platform,” Lamdany said.
Parents can link their own accounts to the accounts of teens 13 and older and get access to a dashboard with insights about teens, she said.
The first set of insights is about who their teen is connected to on Roblox, so parents will get access to a list not only of their child’s connections, but also their trusted connections. That can facilitate conversations between parents and their teens about who their teen is chatting with, particularly about who their teen is chatting with, using unfiltered chat.
Roblox will also provide parents of teens with insights into their child’s screen time, so how much time their child has spent over the last week, each day on Roblox, and also the top games that their teen has been spending time in. So they can really get more of a feel for how their teen is specifically spending time on Roblox, Lamdany said.
“Finally, we’ll allow parents of teens to opt in to spending notifications. They can either choose to receive emails for every transaction that their teen makes on Roblox, or they can choose to get emails only when their teen hits certain high spending thresholds,” she said.