Roblox fails to protect kids from adults — Australia forces changes in three months
Australia's eSafety regulator has found that Roblox is not meeting legal requirements to protect children from unwanted contact with adults. Testing conducted earlier this year revealed that adult strangers can still send connection requests to minors, and children's profiles — including account names, avatar images, biographies, and lists of connections — are visible to anyone on the platform with no option to restrict access.
The regulator, led by eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, said that such requests do not trigger parental alerts. Bad actors can also search children's publicly visible contact lists to find more potential targets. Even more concerning, adults can search for children and comment on their posts in forums outside game environments without parental or carer consent.
Australia's Online Safety Act requires platforms to prevent unwanted contact between adults and minors and mandates that children's accounts be set to private by default. Roblox, which is used by 1.7 million Australian children, believes it is meeting its obligations. However, eSafety's testing flagged alarming gaps in the platform's safeguards.
As a result, Roblox has entered a court-enforceable agreement with eSafety. The company must make changes within the next three months. The upcoming measures will prevent adults from contacting children without parental consent across the entire platform. Roblox has also agreed to implement additional safeguards to address the regulator's concerns, though specific details of these changes have not yet been disclosed.
The agreement comes after eSafety suspected that Roblox was not doing enough to stop child exploitation and conducted its own testing. The findings suggest that despite changes made last fall to help block adults from messaging unknown children, the platform still fails to protect minors in other ways. The regulator's action underscores the growing scrutiny of online platforms' responsibilities under Australian law to ensure the safety of young users.
