My kids want to play roblox, but we all know their primary customers are pedophiles and influencers.
Actual parental controls would mean I’d let kids use this service (and so would my friends). Instead, age verification partitions the user base creating a special space just for child abusers + targets.
According to California’s mandatory child protection training, the first step a successful pedophile will take is identifying a trusted, but not actually monitored environment full of kids.
Age verification laws force platform providers to create such environments online. This shouldn’t be surprising because they were strongly backed by people that directly profit from privacy violations and online abuse (like zuck).
These age verification laws should be repealed.
Who'd use Roblox legitimately if not for the underage? Its pretty terrible.
- Identity verified adults
- Identity verified kids
- Anonymous adults
- Anonymous kids
The last three groups are in a “degraded” mode, I think.
I imagine a large fraction of groomers do not want to tie their activities to real world identities, so they’re mostly group 3.
A different reading is that, if a groomer can trick the face scan into “under 13” mode (putting them in group 2), then the game opens up chat for them, but just with kids.
I’m not sure which it is. I’d happily pay $50 one time for a copy of the game that includes parental controls and does not include anonymous contact with random strangers (including sketchy content creators), but they don’t offer this as a product.