Chatty Australian Roblox users face mandatory facial age checks

The system will be available to Australian Roblox users on a voluntary basis from tonight, but will become mandatory from the first week of December, when the federal government’s social media age ban comes into effect.

Roblox said it will start rolling out the system in Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands in December, ahead of a wider international rollout from January next year.

From the first week of December, Australian Roblox users will need to use the platform’s mobile app to complete the age verification process if they want to continue using the chat feature.

Roblox’s age verification system will rely on facial biometric data to estimate the player’s age. The estimate then determines which other players they can chat with based on age categories.

Roblox vice president of product Rajiv Bhatia said the company had defined six age categories for its chat feature: under nine years, then between the ages of 10 and 1213 to 15 years, 16 to 17 years, 18 to 20 years and over 21 years.

“We decided that simply following the age estimate was the path of least friction, and the path that yielded the best results and minimized the collection of personal information,” Matt Kaufman, Roblox’s chief security officer, told us. iTnews.

Kaufman added that players who have not submitted themselves to the verification process can still play games on the platform without access to in-game chat.

The game’s facial verification process is handled by Persona, the same third-party tool used by Reddit to comply with age restriction rules in the UK. It records a quick video of the player that is immediately deleted after the process is complete, Kaufman said.

Kaufman said that if Roblox’s facial verification process incorrectly determines the player’s age, the user can correct it with a form of government ID.

“They will also be able to do this in the future through verified parental consent, where a parent can vouch for someone who is a minor or may not have ID,” Kaufman said.

The platform provider said it would accept all formal government-issued IDs for identity verification, including driver’s licenses, birth certificates and passports.

Roblox said it was confident that Persona’s age verification system will not determine that a child is older than their actual biological age, based on the average error rates recorded by third-party testing providers in laboratory conditions.

“Persona’s age estimation models achieved a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 1.4 years for minors under the age of 18, based on testing by the Age Check Certification Scheme (ACCS) in Britain,” a Roblox spokesperson said. iTnews.

There is some porosity among age groups based on broader definitions of age-appropriate contact.

Bhatia gave the example of a Roblox player who was estimated to be 12 years old. The player would have access to in-game chat with players who were determined to be 15 years or younger, but were not allowed to use the platform to talk to players 16 or older.

Bhatia said that age verification restrictions will be expanded to collaboration in Roblox Studio in early 2026 – the game’s platform for building worlds and experiences.

The platform provider will also ban creators from sharing social media links or using handles containing them to avoid directing users to “unsafe interactions.”

Creators can still post social media links in profiles, experience details pages, and communities, but they will only be available to users who are verified to be over 13 years old.

Roblox said this would address “nuances” in content age laws in different locations and regions and that it would “address accordingly.”

The changes to the Roblox chat system arrive less than a month before the laws restricting access to age restrictions on social media for children under 16 become enforceable, This has consequences for platforms such as Facebook, Reddit and Instagram.

Roblox missed out on a total ban under the new laws because it fits into the category of a game rather than a social media platform, according to the eSafety Commission.

“If the online gameplay is the main or only purpose, if that were taken away, would the kids still use that messaging functionality to chat? Probably not,” said eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said in November.

However, earlier in September the eSafety committee outlined new safety measures for Roblox to protect children.

These measures, which will be introduced at the end of this year, include making accounts private by default for 16-year-olds and young people and new parental controls to make chat fully mandatory.