Roblox Adding Parental Controls, Will Require Permissions for Young Players

Amid news investigations about predators targeting children on the platform and a class-action lawsuit over gambling in some of its games, Roblox is making changes to parental controls and underage access to the platform. As first reported by Bloomberg, the company behind the popular online game platform has sent an email to parents outlining changes it’s making to Roblox. 

Some of those changes include:

• Requiring parental permission for users under 13 to access some chat features.

• Requiring parental permission for users under 9 to play games with moderate violence or crude humor.

• Parents will be able to link a Roblox account with parent privileges to their child’s account to access and change their parental controls and to monitor activity on Roblox including daily screen time and friends on the platform.

• Account-related information about a child’s account, such as spending details, will no longer be sent to a parent’s email address; they’ll have to access that through the parent’s linked Roblox account.

Roblox sent a copy of the email by request to CNET and a spokesperson said, “The updates that were shared via email are part of Roblox’s commitment to making the platform one of the safest online environments for our users, particularly the youngest users.” 

Roblox has not officially announced these changes outside of that email, but told parents the changes will roll out at an unspecified date next month, putting them sometime in November. 

In the message to parents, Roblox said, “When these changes take effect, your child will receive a notification inviting them to add a linked parent account, and we’ll send you an email with instructions.”

In July, Roblox began changing the way game content is labeled on the platform, adding more description about its content rather than labeling it by the age for which it’s appropriate. At the time, Roblox told game developers, “This change was prompted by user feedback and the recognition that all children develop on different timelines, so labeling experiences based on age does not meet every family’s needs.” 

That change was also mentioned in the email to parents.

Criticisms about Roblox’s platform and underage users echoes larger shifts in parental concerns about the effects of social media on young users and the dangers for underage users involving online gambling sites. Meta recently announced big changes to accounts for teenagers on Instagram. TikTok introduced a Youth Council earlier this year in an attempt to make the platform safer for younger users. This all came after a Pew Research study last year found that 81 percent of adults surveyed favored parental controls for minors using social media. 

Roblox has about 80 million active daily users and, according to Bloomberg’s investigation, about 40 percent of those users are under the age of 13.

Recently, Roblox has been expanding into VR. The game already has a presence on Quest headsets, added virtual avatars to chat and incorporated generative AI elements to help creators who make content for the platform.