Only on WRAL: Roblox official answers questions about safety on the app

Eliza Jacobs, the senior director of product policy at Roblox, spoke with WRAL anchor Ashley Rowe about the platform's safety features and what major change the gaming app is planning to launch.  

Ashley Rowe: Roblox has been rolling out a variety of safety features. Notably, parents can now create their own account and link it to their child's account so that the parents can see what's going on with their children or up to. You know what surprised me about this, Eliza, is that this feature has been out for over a year, and yet most parents I've spoken with whose child uses Roblox. They didn't know about this feature, and it made me wonder, given how many concerns there are about adults and creeps talking to kids on the chat in the game and taking advantage of these kids, it seems that there needs to be better outreach to parents about this. What's your take on this?

Eliza Jacobs: Yeah, you know, we've done lots of communications about this, but we obviously need to do more to really get the word out that we want parents to be engaged with our parental controls and the systems we have to keep their kids safe. Although I do think it's also important to remember that we really have a safe by default strategy here at Roblox. So we know that parents are busy in their lives...and their kids are on lots of platforms, not just Roblox. And so we want parents to know that when their kids sign up for Roblox with their birthday, we're giving them a set of defaults that we think are safe for them, and then they can go in and engage with the parental controls and make updates because all families and kids are different. But we don't think that's required to have their kids settings be safe by default. 

Read WRAL Investigates' story about Roblox

Rowe: Now, of course, children will lie and they will change their birthday. So how do you handle that?

Jacobs:  Yeah, a couple things. First, our research has actually indicated that most younger kids don't do that. They sign up with their real birthday and they get the right settings for them. But that being said, we are announcing, soon, and we've already talked about this publicly that we are going to start employing facial age estimation technology, to ensure that everyone has the right age on their accounts of all ages, and that will be required to engage in any kind of communications on the platform.  So until you use facial age estimation, you will not have access to chat anywhere on the platform. And then once you do, you will have access to age appropriate chat.

Rowe: Empowering artificial intelligence to help make sure that kids are the age that they say they are, and adults are the age that they say they are if they're engaging with this platform. I'm curious, do you have children or nieces or nephews that play Roblox?

Jacobs: Yes, yes I do. I have a six year old daughter and then lots of kids in my life. And, you know, at her elementary school, I get stopped on the street when I wear Roblox gear. But kids of all ages to talk about their love of Roblox, for sure.

Rowe: What do you do to. To make sure that your child is safe when she's playing it?

Jacobs: Yeah. The most important thing, really, is that they're signed up with the right age, in the first place, right? That their birthday is accurate. And that way we can serve them developmentally appropriate content and features, along the way.  That'll age with them as they grow up. We know that teens have a little bit more autonomy, a little bit more privacy, and younger kids have less. That's just natural, for developmental ages and stages. And so we've built our systems to align with that understanding.

Rowe: Do you let do you let your daughter use the chat?

Jacobs: Well, my daughter can't quite. She likes to actually, as a first grader, can't quite read fast enough to use the chat. So, so not relevant for her yet. But I, you know, we have restrictions. We don't allow, our younger users to use direct message. They can only be in in-game chat, which is fully filtered, both proactively filtered, meaning things are hashed out as they go. But also we have models running in the background to detect for any interactions or content that we think are concerning. And those things are flagged and sent to our our teams for deeper investigation. So we have many, many layers of safety that are working on chat and in all of their surfaces on the platform.

Rowe: Yeah. It is fair to say that Roblox has been making increasing efforts to increase the safety measures. You know, this is though, a 20 year old platform. Only recently, though, has the company really started increasing safety measures, going hard on controls. Why did Roblox wait until lawsuits were filed to start taking safety more seriously?

Jacobs: Yeah, actually, I don't think that that's accurate. Safety has been really foundational to to Roblox from the time it started, because we've always been an all ages platform. We've always had much stricter policies than the rest of the internet. This product of text filtering or something that doesn't exist on the internet. We've always had these models running in the background. We don't encrypt because we want to be able to access all of this content. So that's really the foundation of Roblox, and we're just building upon it, especially as technology evolves. So for example, facial edge estimation is just something that didn't exist a couple of years ago in this reliable way. And so as we get new technology and increasing accuracy for these systems, we implement them as fast as we can. And we've always done that and will continue to do that. These systems are always going to be iterating and updating, and we work with our community, and we do research with parents and teens and kids and creators to understand what their needs are and what would be most useful to them.

Rowe: Okay. All of that I get and yet I've also read pages and pages of numerous lawsuits. There are a few cases we know of here in North Carolina. One of them involves a girl who was 13 when she was sexually exploited through Roblox by an adult predator. I mean, again, pages of examples of how safety slips through the cracks on this platform. Does Roblox bear any responsibility for harm done to children through the app?

Jacobs: Even one of these cases is too many, and our hearts go out to the families that have been affected in this way, which is absolutely unacceptable. And we are working, you know, around the clock to try and prevent this as much as we can. But we also understand that this is an industry wide problem. So for example, on Roblox, you can't share images, you can't share videos, in the chat. But we know that other platforms you can do that. And so often what we see is, is people are using predators, are using multiple platforms to be able to engage in these ways that are very inappropriate and illegal. And so, we are trying to work on this both on Roblox but also as an, as an entire industry to make sure that we can keep kids safe everywhere on the internet.

Yeah. I want to play with the lawyer representing this girl who I was just describing says about Roblox. Let's listen.

So I have a pretty simple message to that. And I've said that before in instances like this. Don't use Roblox right now. You know, I think, I think that is number one overall. You know, you can have, a number of different safety measures and the lawyer speak that, that you provided from Roblox, to the general public. But until all those measures are foolproof, tested, and retested, I don't think that Roblox is safe to use for for any minor.

Rowe: Is he wrong? Is it safe?

Jacobs: I think there is no, system that is absolutely bulletproof. Foolproof. Just like no car is 100% safe. You know, you're on the internet, with with other people, but we are building systems every day to make it even safer. And our our facial age estimation is going to mean that you do not have access to communication features unless we know what your real ages. And that you won't be able to talk to people outside of your peer group. So that will mean that that adults, actually cannot contact minors that they don't know on the platform. So this is a leap forward in our ability to, to keep chat safe as one surface. But I also think one of the most important things is that you have an open line of dialog with your kids, and you set up all the settings that you can, but that when they feel uncomfortable or they see something that that they don't like or they don't think is right, that they're talking to you about it and that you're engaged so that there's just no replacement for that kind of engagement with your kids.

Rowe: Well, we certainly look forward to seeing how this age estimation technology rolls out. I know that it's been a highly anticipated one for Roblox, and for all of the users out there. Eliza Jacobs, senior director of product policy at Roblox, really appreciate your time. Thanks so much.