this is unacceptable.

Instructions

i simply cannot comprehend how utterly awful the newest roblox update has turned out to be. the fact that chatting, one of the (essentially) core features of roblox, has been DISABLED unless you verify your age with AN AI AGE ESTIMATOR. this is problematic because, as you’ve probably heard a billion times by now, ai can only estimate based off a face. it doesn’t actually know someone’s age and it’s easily bypass-able. genuinely, i simply can’t explain how harmful this is to so many players and games- sorry- EXPERIENCES alike. it’s not even that too. the main concern is privacy and safety, something that roblox SHOULD be focusing on right now. and they are. sort of. maybe. not really. okay you’re right, roblox doesn’t care about either of the two. this is literally just meant to be another attempt at a public image stunt and an investor pleaser. also, persona, the company that operates the verification system, is apparently notorious for data breaches and all; they can also apparently hold onto your face and other data for a good 3 years if they want to! isn’t that absurd? there’s also stuff to do with biometric things and all that but i won’t go into detail about them. anyhow, to think that the scratch team, a team consisting of a LOT less people who moderate the site, can properly moderate scratch and make good (or okay) decisions whereas roblox barely does anything about safety and PRETENDS to care is sad, even when you think of the ratio of users between scratch and roblox (scratch has considerably less users). this feature is SO easy to bypass, too. bad actors don’t even have to put that much effort into getting past the verification. not only that, but when you DO use your face to go through the verification, sometimes it will guess incorrectly. now, this isn’t really that big of an issue in itself (it’s ai age ESTIMATION, after all) but think about it. a 12 year old could look 16 years old and get assigned a group of older people, in which most of them will be adults before they know it, and vice versa… and because age groups are restricted to purely themselves in terms of chatting, the genuinely good people most likely won’t be able to take action themselves or even feasibly NOTICE any bad situations when someone tricks the verification system because they’re assigned a group that’s entirely different to the good people’s assigned group. essentially, this update will crash and burn, killing entire games and destroying one of roblox’s most prominent features for the sake of reputation, and even if we tried to take further action, the effect will probably be minimal and unhelpful since roblox is raking in a ridiculous amount of money from the investors and the roblox platform itself. we’d have to do something related to impacting the overall reputation of roblox for them to change this feature in the slightest. the company’s net worth is around 50-60 billion US dollars at the moment, so they absolutely must have the money to be able to afford to have an at least decent moderation improvement, but no! they choose to please the investors by taking the lazy way out and implementing a staggeringly bad and poorly thought out system they came up with in 15 seconds! roblox has been torn apart and they don’t care. “b-but… you wanted this feature! you wanted a safety feature and you g-got a safety featur-“ shut up. we don’t want this ai verification slop. we want a genuine improvement in our safety. roblox is LITERALLY ONLY IMPLEMENTING THIS FEATURE BECAUSE OF ALL THE DRAMA HAPPENING. entire games have been ruined and rendered unplayable due to this phenomenally stupid downgrade of an update, countless people are under high risk of a data leak and having their FACES exposed for anyone to see (potentially, as a result) and so many loopholes that are most likely already being put to use have led to the update being a disaster. no one likes this update! and yet roblox was still completely on board with letting this update come out! it’s already been proven that it’s an excruciatingly bad feature and roblox only turns a blind eye at this because of the god damn SHAREHOLDERS!!! (or investors whom i’ve been blaming this entire time) negativity aside, roblox is, at the very very least, still somewhat playable (aside from survival games, roleplay games, strategy games and other communication-oriented genres and subgenres) and games can still be played, single player games in particular, but still, the ai age estimation feature being implemented alone results in absolute disaster. there are so many other things i could ramble on about relating to the situation right now, but i don’t think i will for the sake of my precious time that’s moving at the speed of light. i’ll just say that roblox has become 50% unplayable/unusable/unwhateverable from this update alone, and the situation roblox as a company and its ceo are in is already dire enough. this is simply unacceptable. tl;dr: roblox’s new chat update sucks.