According to TechCrunch, Roblox is now rolling out a mandatory age verification requirement globally for any user who wants to access its chat features. This follows initial tests in select markets last month and comes amid lawsuits from state attorneys general in Texas and Louisiana over child safety concerns. Users must complete a facial verification scan through the Roblox app, with images processed by a third-party vendor called Persona, or verify via ID if they are 13 or older. The company states all user images and videos are deleted after processing. If the system gets a user’s age wrong, they can appeal and use alternative verification methods. Once verified, users are placed into one of six age groups and can only chat with people in their own group or the groups directly above and below it.
The pressure is real
Look, this isn’t some proactive, feel-good safety feature dreamed up in a vacuum. This is a direct response to legal fire. When you’ve got multiple states suing you, alleging your platform exposes kids to grooming and explicit content, you move fast. The old honor system—just typing in your birth year—was clearly not cutting it. So now we get biometrics. It’s a huge shift, basically trading a massive privacy concern (facial data) to address an even bigger liability (child safety). And you can bet the lawyers were deeply involved in crafting those privacy promises about deleting the images. The question is, will users and parents trust it?
How the chat bubbles work now
Here’s the thing about the new age-banding for chat: it’s restrictive by design. Splitting users into six groups (under 9, 9-12, 13-15, 16-17, 18-20, 21+) and only allowing cross-talk with adjacent groups is a blunt instrument. A 12-year-old can talk to a 15-year-old, but not a 16-year-old. It creates these artificial social silos. For a platform built on connection and shared experiences, that’s a fundamental change to the social fabric. And chat is off by default for the under-9 crowd, which is smart, but also highlights how risky the unmoderated space was before. This is the platform admitting, through architecture, that open communication was a problem.
The privacy trade-off
So your kid wants to chat with their friends on Roblox. Now you, the parent, have to consent to them handing their facial data to a company called Persona. Roblox says it gets deleted. Persona says it gets deleted. But that’s a lot of faith to place in a corporate promise, especially when the alternative is your kid being locked out of a core social function of the game. It creates a coercive environment for consent. I think a lot of parents will just click “yes” to avoid the argument. And what about the appeal process if the AI gets it wrong? The blog post mentions Roblox is “constantly evaluating user behavior” to flag people who might be in the wrong age bracket, which sounds an awful lot like pervasive surveillance. You’re trading one form of exposure for another.
A necessary evil or a slippery slope?
Is this the future for all social and gaming platforms targeting young users? Probably. The legal and regulatory winds are blowing hard in this direction. For Roblox, it’s a defensive move to shore up its business model, which has faced scrutiny beyond just safety, as highlighted in reports like the one from Hindenburg Research. But implementing this globally is a staggering technical and trust challenge. Will it stop bad actors? Determined adults will find ways to bypass it, using stolen IDs or other methods. But it will likely raise the barrier significantly. The real impact is on the average user experience: more friction, less spontaneity, and a biometric hurdle just to say “gg.” In the end, it feels like a necessary, if deeply imperfect, step for a platform that grew too fast without enough guardrails. The childhood playground just got a lot more complicated.
