eSafety puts Roblox on notice amid fears of grooming, sexual exploitation and abuse

Popular gaming app Roblox could face up to $100m in court-enforced fines if it does not bolster its safety features for children as promised in a legal agreement with the online safety regulator.

The eSafety Commission, which has been investigating Roblox for two years, has accepted a court-enforceable undertaking from the platform which commits it to implement more robust measures to protect children from grooming, sexual exploitation, and abuse.

These include preventing adults from contacting unknown children without parental consent; making children’s accounts private by default; developing accessible reporting mechanisms that notify users of complaint outcomes; and engaging a third party to audit the effectiveness of its safety measures, including its use of age-estimation measures.

Roblox – the second most popular game with children in Australia – will have three months to implement the features.

Testing by eSafety earlier this year found Roblox allowed contact between children and adult strangers, and that children’s profiles, biographies, and account names were visible to adults, among other risks.

“So that might be fun when you’re an avatar trying to connect with a friend,” eSafety Commisioner Julie Inman-Grant told ABC Radio National.

“But if a predator has a road map for grooming that tells them that this child is 12, they go to a specific school and they like Taylor Swift, it’s not only on-platform that we worry about either.

“Often this is the primary hunting ground where they identify the kids and then they move them to other platforms.”

Ms Inman-Grant said Roblox had been “constructive” in its compliance with the investigation.

Roblox was not part of the federal government’s December social media ban for teens, as the laws only captured social media sites.

“The (legislation) had a specific exemption for gaming and messaging platforms so that children wouldn’t totally have their digital lifelines cut off,” Ms Inman-Grant said.

But she warned the “more social media functionality” a platform, including Roblox, developed, the more likely it was for it to be captured by the social media age ban.

In April, eSafety issued transparency notices to Roblox and other online gaming services requiring them to report the steps taken to protect children from child sexual exploitation and abuse, violent material and activity, cyber-bullying and online hate.

A report on the findings from these notices is expected later this year.