Gaming platform Roblox has made it mandatory for children under 16 in Indonesia to undergo facial age verification. The move comes nearly a month after Indonesia banned users younger than 16 from accessing digital platforms that could expose them to cyberbullying, pornography, online scams and addiction.
How will Roblox implement age-based chats for children? As per Associated Press, the company has introduced two new age-based accounts for younger users in Indonesia: Roblox Kids for users aged 5 to 12 and Roblox Select for users aged 13 to 15.
While Roblox Kids accounts will have chat features disabled, those with Roblox Select accounts will require parental consent for accessing chat features.
How will the changes affect registered minor users? Roblox has identified 23 million accounts belonging to users under 16. Nicky Jackson Colaco, Roblox’s vice president and global head of public policy, reportedly said that any user in Indonesia who has not used the age verification tool or completed facial age estimation will automatically be placed in a Roblox Kids account and barred from accessing chat features.
The age verification tool requires users to take a video selfie that will be used to estimate their age. While the Roblox executive said the data would be immediately deleted, the company did not specify how long the videos would be retained.
Why this matters: In January this year, WIRED reported that age-verified Roblox accounts for minors as young as 9 years old were being sold on eBay for as little as $4, allowing bad actors to bypass the age verification process using pre-verified accounts. When an adult seeking children’s data, or a child seeking access to adult content, can simply purchase their way past the checks, the verification process stops being a barrier and becomes a commodity.
In what is arguably a more alarming trend, parents were recently found to be completing age checks on behalf of their children on Roblox, resulting in some children being classified as 21+ and gaining access to adult content.
Do facial age estimation systems work? Matt Kaufman, Roblox’s chief of safety, recently told The Guardian that facial age estimation systems have an error rate of about 1.4 years for users under 18, with some users exploiting this loophole.
Last month, the Australian eSafety Commissioner confirmed that children could easily bypass facial age estimation technology deployed by social media platforms if they were within two years of turning 16. In many cases, platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube reportedly encouraged users to bypass security checks.
Can age-based restrictions prevent minors from accessing digital platforms?
Nikhil Pahwa, founder and editor of MediaNama, said:
“Bans won’t stop access. Children will use VPNs. They’ll lie about their age. The outcome is that they access online platforms without supervision, without parental involvement, and through workarounds. And that’s not necessarily safer.”
A recent survey by Internet Matters revealed that 32% of children in the UK had already bypassed age checks by entering fake birthdates, using someone else’s login credentials, or even drawing fake moustaches.
Furthermore, as per India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Rules, 2025 children under 18 can access the internet only after obtaining parental consent. However, according to Pahwa, the law ignores the possibility of children self-declaring their age.
“Self declaration makes the law redundant because children will lie about their age. If a child does not disclose that they are a child, then parental consent is never triggered,” Pahwa said.
As reported earlier, India is considering three-tiered social media restriction framework, rather than a blanket ban, for users under 18.
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