Introducing Age Verification

Though I applaud the effort to get age right and protect players, I'm not sure I'll ever be comfortable having me or my child scan our photo ID and selfie to upload it as part of a login flow to an application.

Where does the need for hard verification of the age come from?<p>My friends and I were using the internet when we were under 13 years old (although not by much), and just clicked the button to confirm that we are older than 13 (mostly on various forums), and later on the same thing with 18 years old verification screens, and we turned out alright (at least from my perspective.)

So I&#x27;m supposed to trust that they will never have a data breach? For the lifetime of the company? And for all subsequent acquirers?

I understand the massive investments into &quot;rolling your own&quot; system for ID verification, but I always feel sketched out when companies ask you to send your ID and your photo to &quot;a third-party&quot; - where the privacy terms of that relationship are so obtuse&#x2F;vague it&#x27;s not worth reading.<p>Is it really that hard on the privacy front to hire someone to keep watch and manually verify that someone is who they say they are? I assume the amount of people verifying will be massive at first, but after 2-3 months I could see the amount of people signing up (AND verifying their ID) would be in the thousands per week - easily handled by humans instead of &quot;a third-party service&quot;

Can&#x27;t someone train a GAN to do this-id-does-not-exists.com?<p>I would use it quite often for this kinds of things.

Putting sensitive information about children on the internet, in the hands of a major corporation (a gaming company, no less).<p>What could go wrong?

In the US, how many 13 year olds have id cards? It seems like by the time they have a drivers license they might not be into roblox anymore.

The age verification appears to be opt-in, however they don&#x27;t say what happens if you don&#x27;t hand over your kids ID. One would hope that it would disable or limit communication between players and keep the player in a suitable for all category. I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised that because their user base is growing up, they they would want to change it into kind of a &quot;second life&quot; for teenagers.<p>Whichever way, they&#x27;re not getting my kids ID.

&gt; <i>nearly 50% of the users on our platform are over the age of 13 as of Q2 2021</i><p>Hahahaha... jeez... <i>&#x2F;wipes a tear</i><p>They are in for a surprise of their corporate lives.<p>We have several accounts with them for our kids and I had all of them set with the birthday set to some random year between 1960 and 1990. Because, as every parent knows, any sort of &quot;kids&quot; account comes with random restrictions, needing to create parent account and all sort of other bullshit that complicates everyone&#x27;s life and prolongs the sign-up process.<p>They must be smoking crack if they think that a non-trivial amount of <i>teens</i> (leave alone adults) are playing Roblox games. Because 99.9% of these games is a complete and utter junk that makes your eyes bleed and gets traction because of the (way) younger kids that play them. That&#x27;s it. That&#x27;s the Roblox secret sauce. But, yeah, let&#x27;s card them. Brilliant, brilliant move.

This is giving me flashbacks to the VTech scandal where they ended up leaking out photos and personal information for over 6 million kids.

I didn&#x27;t have an ID until I started driving at 15. I wonder how many of the Roblox player base even has a government ID. Will children beg their parents to go to the DMW so they can get verified on Roblox?

First off... NOT A FUCKING CHANCE. If a kid came to me with a game that was asking for &quot;opt in&quot; age verification by scanning government ID, and they wanted to do it, we&#x27;d have a long talk about privacy and that game would get uninstalled even if it means the end result is the kid crying over it.<p>Second, how is this going to work? I don&#x27;t know a single kid that plays Roblox and has a government issued photo ID. And are they <i>REALLY</i> going to roll out a system where they&#x27;re trying to train minors to scan their ID and submit it to a corporation for something as trivial as a <i>game</i>?<p>&gt; When a government-issued ID is scanned for verification, an anonymized value is generated, allowing Roblox to safely verify identity without risking exposure of the user’s real identity.<p>There are two possibilities here:<p>1. It&#x27;s absolutely bullshit and they store some portion of uniquely identifiable identity info, like your name + birthdate, somewhere.<p>2. It&#x27;s absolutely useless because someone will create a website or app that fools the system by showing fake id and a matching &quot;likeness&quot;.<p>So I don&#x27;t believe <i>at all</i> the glossed over claims of respecting privacy on this. This is a bad idea and I hope it fails spectacularly.

I guess my kids will miss Roblox when it goes away forever.

Roblox seems to be a self-correcting problem.

Use some official eID. They are pretty pervasive across the world and typically it’s just one system per country to intract with like Freja in Norway, BankID in Sweden and so on.<p>That leaves the bad methods for countries that doesn’t have a good official or de facto standard eID system. But maybe that will create public pressure to adopt one.

What 13 year old has a government issued ID?

fantastic news. with this, the fate of corporate roblox is sealed and the metaverse can evolve further

This appears to be designed to encourage the user to lie. I have never seen a workflow where a low age enables some type of restriction and that restriction is disclose when asking your age for verification. This is a first.

I&#x27;ve held shares in Roblox since ipo. This is concerning.

What happens if&#x2F;when these systems are hacked and millions of users&#x27; government-issued identities are freely available to anyone on the dark net?

Put PHI into a video game? What could go wrong? its not like you can mod roblox.... oh.<p>Well atleast video game code is nice and secur..... oh.

Are there any good identify verification saas?

Thanks. Now I have a reason to close my kids account :)

What governments issue photo IDs to 14 year olds?

Something I think that should be mentioned: Everytime you submit an image of an id: That gets shared through out the verifying organizations communication channels.<p>Wither it&#x27;s via database accessibility (even if it&#x27;s encrypted), a web front end, email, or IMs. They&#x27;ll say all they want, but ids do leak.