Reference: https://en.help.roblox.com/hc/en-us/articles/39143693116052-...
Maybe they are expanding into other industries, but the safety focus predates that.
Is there a 'break glass' workflow in case you are not available (e.g., health incident)?
I mean his classmates argue with their parents about whether they can install TikTok (and most parents lose). Meanwhile I’m denying my son the right to make a game together with a friend. It’s so creative and so educative and I’m saying no to it. It sucks and I hate Roblox for making something so cool and then taking it away for such stupid reasons.
I’d happily pay a license fee or sth. But I’m not gonna let them scan my son’s face.
“Sit down together” might be impractical here, if GP’s child’s friends are e.g. friends they made before a move, who are thus quite far away physically. Or friends with snobby parents who won’t let them come over to GP’s house for whatever dumb reason. Or friends with extra-curriculars such that their free time never lines up with GP’s kid’s free time—meaning that only async collaboration will work.
(That’s just a steelman position, though; in general I agree.)
How about the option of the state not being so tyrannical in meddling about what people anonymously do online in their free time?
To the extent that it matters, I think the missing link here is "primary education should support a parent's intent to limit unrestricted internet access for their children." That is, during school activities where internet use is unavoidable, require supervision. (Maybe a lab monitor that can roam the room and see screens?) And for homework, don't assume the kid has internet access, because that is the parent's choice, and they may well not. On the flip side, if the parent trusts their kid with that access, or intends for them to learn through real world experience, let them. That should not be the state's decision.
The problem of course is that this idea in my head is a pipe dream. Schools seem to be well onboard with digital coursework, presumably for efficiency reasons? Unclear. I'm not sure what a more practical middle ground actually looks like.
Don't get me started. We try to restrict internet time, no Youtube (Shorts are poison/heroin), TikTok, etc. They go to primary school and there is a teacher that makes TikTok videos at school, they can play Roblox in breaks, etc. (Aside from this issue, the teachers are great though!)
There are only so many battles you can choose as a parent (not getting your kids photographed, put on Facebook, etc.).
In contrast to what the grandparent states, the government should unambiguously state: no smartphones, social media, and online games in primary school, period. That's the only way to make it work. Ironically, smartphones are forbidden in all high schools here.
I'd have hated this as a child. But the case for unrestricted internet and social media access for children being harmful, at this point, seems pretty shut.
For those who sadly cannot homeschool their children... well, we need to push for school choice and to dismantle the teachers' unions. Which probably ultimately is the same thing.
I guess once you hand your teenager a smart phone (and all their friends have one too!) all bets are off. That's new, and wasn't a thing when I grew up. We were rural and on the tail end of dial-up, so I couldn't get online at home without someone hearing the modem. That sure limited my attempts to do so without permission!
I don't fully trust my government. But I definitely trust it more than any American tech company.
I can also vote out my government. I can't do that for Big Tech.
You can't. Not if you're in the minority. Tyranny of the majority is still tyranny.
You what you as an individual most certainly can do is stop using Roblox. Not ideal, but way easier than moving to a new country.
People need to understand that having a majority opinion does not inherently give you the right to impose that opinion on everyone else. Such impositions must be done with extreme hesitancy and restraint.
That's why many democratic countries have a constitution which prevents the government from restricting certain individual rights even in the face of popular opinion. But ultimately, the constitution is just a piece of paper. If people are determined to impose their will on others, it can only do so much.
We're getting pretty deep into philosophical territory now, but I disagree. Human rights, to the extent they exist at all, are necessarily inherent properties of individuals.
E.g. If the majority decides people with dark skin are subhuman and therefore have no rights, the majority is most certainly not correct about that, because rights are not defined by the majority opinion. They are inherent.
The U.S. Declaration of Independence put it like this:
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
I concur with this perspective; rights are inherent and inalienable, and the purpose of democratic government is to secure those rights (which already exist), not to create them.
Only if you believe in a creator that determined these right, which is not rooted in fact, but solely belief.
Personally, I do not believe a particular ethics exist as an absolute/scientific truth. It is just that some amount cooperation is generally better for everyone and virtually all humans want to avoid pain and seek happiness.
Even though I was a convinced utilitarianist when I was young, I think Kant's categorical imperatives are more powerful now: you should act only according to principles you would want everyone to adopt as a universal law. Or Rawls' original position [1].
Even though this might sound like an off-topic philosophical debate, I think it is very relevant to democracy. Purely egoism-based democracy would trample on the rights of minorities, etc. But in a democracy based on these principles, the majority would vote to project minorities, etc.
I am not sure how you would modify democracy to align with this. I think it is for a large part of education. E.g. if everyone thinks every choice is a zero-sum game (my loss is another's win and vise versa), democracy will go in a very dark direction.
What's sad is that there's a formulation that's actually correct. Rights are an inherent property of societies (or stable ones, at least). Note that I'm saying rights in an abstract sense, not necessarily any specific set of rights. Not every society will value the same things the same way.
>E.g. If the majority decides black people are subhuman and therefore have no rights, the majority is most certainly not correct about that, because rights are not defined by the majority opinion.
So it's an objective fact that they're incorrect? I.e. they can be shown to be incorrect without having to ask anyone's opinion? Okay, prove it.
>The U.S. Declaration of Independence put it like this:
That's an opinion. It's perfectly fine to think these things are so obvious they don't need to be justified, but I don't agree that that's true, even if I subjectively hold the same opinion.
The opinion of a few slave owners 250 years ago
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal
For a given definition of "men"
> I concur with this perspective
Good for you. You have an opinion, doesn't make it a fact.
Democracy is the most fair way of doing so.
What we consider democracy went through a LOT of iteration, and continues to this day. Representative first-past-the-post is a form of democracy that can have the unfortunate side effect of the minority of the electorate establishing a tyranny of the majority. There is a lot of scholarship on how to make democratic systems more democratic.
Is that a bad thing?
> you as an individual
I understand. Such is living in a society. No man is an island.
> Not ideal, but way easier than moving to a new country.
I've moved countries five times. I still haven't been able to get rid of my dependencies on Big Tech.
Meanwhile, all you need to do to get rid of a dependency on big tech is to log off.
Like you also voted out the EU pricks that pushed chat control?
https://edri.org/our-work/how-a-hollywood-star-lobbies-the-e...
No.
- Netherlands, WWII: The Dutch civil registry meticulously recorded religion. It’s a major reason ~75% of Dutch Jews were killed, the highest rate in occupied Western Europe (vs ~25% in France, where records were poorer).
- US, Japanese internment: The Census Bureau provided block-level data on Japanese Americans in 1942 despite confidentiality guarantees; 2007 research showed individual names and addresses were shared too.
- Rwanda, 1994: Belgian colonial administrators had put ethnicity (Hutu/Tutsi) on national ID cards in the 1930s. Sixty years later those cards were the primary tool at genocide checkpoints.
There’s loads more. Europe may be safe now so it feels safe to give government this information. However, as shown in all the instances above, the information was collected for one reason and used for a wholly different reason when times changed.
Who knows what kinds of ethnicities, beliefs, behaviors or personal histories will be the focus of future regimes? It could be Roblox users, HN commenters, people who religiously repost x.com links as xcancel.com ones, anything. Whatever it is, they will have access to all the data on any system we allow them to record. This isn’t even a totally made up hypothetical from far away places, multiple governments in Europe were doing this kind of thing just decades ago. Historically speaking, we are all currently living in an unusually peaceful era, that will likely be temporary for many of us.
Records were poorer in France because René Carmille and the French resistance sabotaged the machines. Machines made by a large tech company which was a competitor to IBM.
> Who knows what kinds of ethnicities, beliefs, behaviors or personal histories will be the focus of future regimes?
Absolutely. But I do know who has that data -- big tech, and it's willing to sell it for a nominal price. No doubt that price will be higher for a deaparate government wanting to kill everyone with green eyes, but that just means a higher profit margin for facebook as they mine their shadow profiles.
There is a big difference between: Government demands every website to have age verification, and government supported scheme by which service can opt into age verification.
As of now, American private spyware is actively filling the demand.
I get the feeling some privacy advocates are approaching the choice as a tier system, with government being the worst case.
I don't see it.
The only viable solution for the future of privacy is to not be dependent on the giant platforms in the first place.
Nah. Parental Controls are baked into every major consumer OS. If government cared about giving guardians the tools needed to care for the vulnerable ones they're responsible for, they'd require those parental controls to be beefed up [0] and that it be a requirement that online services and both local and remote software be required to honor the restrictions required by those Parental Controls.
Instead, what we get proposed is a system that cares very much about how old you are, and not one bit about the things that one's guardian understands one needs to be protected from. This system will work for some under-eighteens, but it will fail for many others, as well as every single dementia-damaged elder or brain-damaged/developmentally-stunted adult.
What's being proposed is absolutely not about protecting people... if it were, the mandate would be to beef up the existing fully-anonymous systems, rather than requiring identifying information from users.
[0] ...I mention this because I often hear in Internet discussion that these controls are insufficient, not because I have personal knowledge that they're inadequate.
Even the parental controls that are there are a train wreck. Our kid has an iPhone and the parental controls have all kinds of weird issues like, you give them 15 minutes of WhatsApp daily. First time on a day they start WhatsApp it says that all their time is up. Or suddenly they cannot run an application that was permitted by a parent. Then you uninstall and install the app again and suddenly it works.
It is unusable.
There web is also a huge hole in all of this. A lot of services you can also use as a website. A whitelist is too limiting and a blacklist is a daily task to maintain (and would require spying on your kid).
I also prefer to avoid age attestation altogether, but I am also not sure what the solution is. I think many people do not realize how much social pressure there is to use certain apps/games and how bad parental controls are. Yes, we say "no" to a lot of things, but you cannot say "no" to everything. Missing certain cultural touchstones (certain TV shows, certain games) makes your child an outsider.
As I said:
If government cared about giving guardians the tools needed to care for the vulnerable ones they're responsible for, they'd require those parental controls to be beefed up...
and as I went on to say:
...and that it be a requirement that online services and both local and remote software be required to honor the restrictions required by those Parental Controls.
Nope.
Privacy advocacy is losing the battle, because it is being framed as a choice between privacy and the status quo, and people vehemently dislike the status quo.
But cellphone access is different; it's assumed to be perfect, but it's increasingly being moderated by machine learning heuristics that serve as judge, jury, and executioner, severing your services if a couple of your actions trigger a fuzzy approximation to some of the training data.
AI moderation helps suppress spammers, but it's also punishing false positives, and there is just no recourse. Any ID system that piggybacks on "Apple | Google" is effectively shunning some non trivial portion of society. Governments of the people need to provision their own tech systems that are accessible to all citizens, even those who have run afoul of an AI moderation system.
It started when he signed up at a new bank, giving them his phone number. Somehow the bank enrolled his in their online banking system, which notified Samsung, who remotely initiated the "let's give your phone a pin" flow, presumably to protect him during online banking. (This happened without his knowledge -- he had not installed the bank's phone app.)
Later that day, when his phone went into a modal "let's setup a pin" screen, he panicked, assuming an attacker had gained control of his phone, since this was not something he initiated. No button would let him exit the screen, so he powered it down. Now, when he powers it up, it demands a pin, but he doesn't know what pin that would be. The only way to get the phone back would be to factory reset it, meaning he'd be wiping his data. He had the money to replace his phone, but that may not be true of every citizen, especially at his age.
People assume digital auth systems are perfect. But you don't hear from consumers who can't get online to tell you "I've lost access."
I've shared some other similar stories: a widow who got banned for life from facebook within minutes of making an account from an apple device on a consumer ISP with her real cell phone number.
A coworker attempted to sell his son's sporting goods on facebook marketplace and was banned for life with no appeal because AI thought it was "weapons."
Some high school students each made a gmail address from the same laptop one afternoon, only to be banned the next day. Each supplied their own cellphone number, but the accounts got shut down, presumably because multiple accounts were being created from the same device too rapidly.
AI moderation means there are a ton of unwritten rules, and private companies will keep you out of their platforms if you break them. That's fine, but it means governments have no business serving their citizens from these exclusive platforms.
> e signed up at a new bank, giving them his phone number. Somehow
Do you have a proof that this actually a thing? I don't see what mechanism exists to do this and I don't see why Samsung would even bother to do this.
Also, don't use Roblox, you can freely share games made with PICO-8, Löve, Godot, Rpgmaker, Game maker and the like, no need to go to the hell scape that is Roblox and its dark patern and locked down ecosystem.
I agree that Roblox is a hellscape when you want to make serious games, eg make money from it or sth, but if you just want to mess around making a “supermarket horror tower defense” game full of in-jokes and then have all five of your friends join it, and It Just Works, sorry but nothing comes close to Roblox.
Until they required age verification for that ofc.
Also, just don't ever buy any Robux and kids will auto steer away from the shitty games that need it. That filters out 95% of the badness of Roblox right out the gate.
S&B or other engine-as-game solve that by using the platform account system and master server for discovery and NAT punch through.
Don't get me wrong. I agree roblox is a very shady operation, but that does not erase the fact that their platform is unmatched when it comes to letting kids make games.
Ok, well then, toss your hands in the air and throw away all your principles then, I suppose.
How is the view in your FOMO dungeon?
There also Luanti, the new name of MineTest, which is closer to the Roblox experience (in the sense that there already a playable game there, and creating new stuff is closing to modding than to game making).
The only thing close is minecraft, which from what I heard already has similar restrictions on in game chat, plus other shady maneuvers from Microsoft.
It's the same network effect with other megacorp, we could argue the same about X/Instagram/Mastodon, the question could be changed to: Do you want your children to be groomed to use closed source ecosystem from shady companies or do you prefer they gain experience in using relatively open ecosystem ?
Luanti let you make multiplayer games/mods too. For Minecraft there way to play outside of Microsoft sanctioned versions and servers.
Nobody uses platforms because they are are looking to exercise billions of options. The point is easy commonality. You sit next to a kid, and, what do you know, they are into Roblox too. Cool. Wanna play?
For Minecraft random people are more of a nuisance than an asset, but for a Roblox obby there is an expectation that other people will check it out.
Besides the game engine, it provided central identity (optional - you could allow players to sign in as Guest), a website to browse games and servers, a forum to discuss games and programming, and an IDE with a built-in sprite editor (it was 2D), map editor and object browser.
My son had a similar "making games" interests and I just showed him the Godot engine. Roblox bosses are doing you a favor. Act now :D
We don’t know what EU would become in 5 to 10 years in the future, and I would rather not have any identification information about me or family being stored by a government body or any other party that can track/link me or my family members
As an example if I’m obliged to share my ID data via government to open a twitter account how would I know that the government would not link my twitter account to my ID and later use that info keep track of me and prosecute?
People would think that it would never happen, but not long ago that actually happened in East Germany. The Stasi kept track/files on almost every East German and this would be a digital version of the same thing
I agree that governments should minimize collection of their citizen's data. I just don't see where it is supposed to happen in this case.
There is no guarantee that the app would stay open source and under public scrutiny forever. Governments have done way shady things in the past. Given the recent push for chat control, I would never trust anything put out by EU.
This is a bit of a 64,000 euro question, though. Look very closely at what the government exemptions for GDPR are.
[citation needed]
Actually the market leader app for scanning faces and documents is an Israeli company. They encourage to use mobile for scanning, for your convenience. They promise they delete the data. Yeah, if they're lying you can sue them in Israel.
I don't think it's Godwin's Law when you are so spot on, exactly describing the worst case.
However even if the app is secure the storage and handling of the information is a different matter and it has been shown that care is not always taken.
Governments likely already know your name, age, place of birth, so having an app with a standard API for verifying users isn't giving the government additional data.
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/factpages/blueprint...
First, the user downloads the app onto their phone and sets it up by certifying their age. This can be done with a biometric passport/ID card, a national eID (e.g. national ID Card or other electronic identification mean), a pre-installed third-party app (e.g. a banking app), or in person (e.g. at the post office). Only the information confirming that the user is over the age will be saved in the app. No name, no birthday, or any other data is saved.
After completing this step, the communication between the app and the provider certifying the user’s age (e.g. eID, third-party app) ends. No further data is exchanged.
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/faqs/eu-age-verific...
so it will gather extra data, sell it sideways and leak like hell. (as they already do with all the data they already have)
https://www-bitsoffreedom-nl.translate.goog/2026/07/06/aivd-...
Amusingly fantastically wrong.
NL may have its own issues like you linked to, but more uniquely had their collected data abused more than other countries in probably the worst event in history.
How is, of all things, an age verification app going to make that worse?
I mean I understand your argument in principle but it seems you’re arguing against ~every present-day functional government and not against an age verification app.
Like if I was the boss of a train company I would probably not put up a photo of Mussolini as a motivational poster. Well… maybe I would, but only ironically.
> How is, of all things, an age verification app going to make that worse?
What are you arguing for, here? If everything were perfectly anonymous, maybe. But NOT ONCE in history has governments decided to not abuse power. It'd be so easy to just put a tracker in there or something.
All these "think of the children" arguments are ALWAYS red herrings. Literally any action, any freedom denied, can be justified in the fight against CSAM. And so they get rushed through and abused.
The EU DNS filter (CSAADF) was literally IMMEDIATELY abused to block other things too.
"It's just age verification". Is it, though? How do you verify age without verifying identity? How do you verify its use, without tracking. Provably without tracking. Provably without what's called "turnkey tyranny"?
I think if your argument, which is an extremely common argument, is "I just want to block children's access to bad stuff on the Internet", then you cannot possibly have been paying attention to this debate that's been going on since at least the mid 1990s. Were you even born when this was being discussed? If that's your argument then you have about 30 years of catching up to do before you should speak.
[1] yes, I know Mussolini did not in fact make the trains run on time.
zero-knowledge proofs
the point is non-govt entities shouldn't get any information about you during age verification other than that you're over 18 and that's what ZKP can give you
I'm sorry, you can't just drop "quantum computer", or "zero knowledge proof", or "flux capacitor", and think that you have solved the problem.
Just dropping "zero-knowledge proof" as if it's a mic drop moment is like when Turnbull said "the laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia".
The devil in all this is in the details. Just saying "zero-knowledge proof" is just barely more productive than saying "won't someone please think of the children?".
If you don't have a complete solution, then you're "not even wrong".
In addition to that, you have misunderstood how zero-knowledge even addresses the main problems. Not the technical problems, and DEFINITELY not the meatspace problems.
Second: There was some substance. Maybe not six paragraphs worth, but there was some. Here it is: You, when you said "zero-knowledge proofs", did not give much substance. How, specifically, is that going to work?
It's a bit rich for you to be complaining that knorker didn't have any substance, when the problem is that you didn't give any.
I'm just gobsmacked, and your e the highest up vote... HN is simply full of government skills and I'm not even allowed to point that out. Crazy stuff.
Why is pedophilia such a problem on Roblox? It's because they heavily advertise towards children and one of the fastest ways for children to make money is asking their parents, then next is prostitution. Roblox is uniquely bad because they heavily advertise both products and the "self-made entrepreneur" image to children.
Putting the blame on nebulous "predators" when the system itself is clearly to blame is the very tacit Roblox relies on. Look at vehicular manslaughter are drunk and distracted drivers solely to blame for deaths? Clearly not since there are just as many drunks and phones in Europe as in the US. When the system creates more predators than exist otherwise then you know it needs to change.
If your son likes making games keep him on Godot. Your job as a parent is to find or build a good distribution system. you can see if he is generally interested or if he was pressured by an exploitative system grooming him into pumping out slop for the trough. Age verification is going to make the platform more exploitative in the business sense. Both in that it legitimizes bad practices and lets Roblox target their exploitative practices more effectively.
Very few kids are going to go though the incredible difficulty of making multiplayer work in something like Godot.
In any case, I think that age gating would not be needed if the platforms were regulated to remove addictive recommendation algorithms.
The app is an alternative for people who don't want to buy or carry around a card reader, but who already have a smartphone.
So it seems that the app is only an alternative in the case of government portals, but it is not an alternative for "age verification".
[I'm in the US, we're very ID-averse here, weird, but is what it is]
Smartphones can read that chip and the state as well as private businesses could in principle use this to do age verification – even the super minimal version of age verification that just asks for a certain age threshold and gets a binary response whether that threshold is met. (Which to me if we can achieve it is the perfect solution.)
The infrastructure is there and since 2017 those RFID chips are even actived by default when new ID cards are issued. (The cards are valid for ten years so nearly all ID cards have those active chips.)
The biggest issue currently is a network effect one: hardly anyone is using the chip so people don’t create their initial PIN, creating a UX hurdle for adoption. (If you want to use your ID card chip you have to find your initial PIN somewhere in your documents – if you didn’t throw it away – and then create your proper PIN, you can’t just start using it.)
I can sense usage increasing but exactly because of the poor initial use UX all sorts of private alternate solutions exist that are plain worse from a privacy preserving point of view. For example ones where you film your ID card from both sides (so the hologram is visible) which just suck. (You just share everything … which is just so unnecessary.)
To change this we would need a policy that requires age verification without sharing the birthdate or any other PII.
Unfortunately, we can't even get states to commit to our RealID requirements[1] (which doesn't even add a chip/PIN, it only strengthens validation of documents submitted at the time of application for a driving license). And the notion of a national ID is anathema to large swaths of the population.