Roblox forced to do more to protect children from online predators
Roblox is no safe playground for kids, Australia’s online safety regulator claims.
Image by Cybernews.
- Roblox agreed to stronger protections after Australia’s eSafety Commissioner found risks to children on the platform.
- The regulator said adults could contact children and view some child profile details without parental consent.
- Roblox must make child accounts more private, improve reporting tools, and allow independent audits.
- The company has 3 months to act or the regulator may seek a Federal Court order.
Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.
Roblox has agreed to take stronger action to protect Australian children from online harm, such as grooming and sexual exploitation.
The eSafety Commissioner, Australia’s online safety regulator, and Roblox have been in talks for 2 years about the gaming platform’s failings to comply with the Online Safety Act’s codes and standards.
Testing by the regulator earlier this year showed that Roblox’s safety systems continue to put Australian children at risk.
For example, adults were able to send connection requests to children without parental consent. Children and adults could also view and respond to one another’s posts on forums outside game environments without parental consent.
Furthermore, children’s connections were visible to anyone on the Roblox platform.
Lastly, children’s profiles and biographies, including account names, number and names of connections, avatar images, and non-sensitive biographical information such as their interests, were visible to anyone on the Roblox platform, with no way to hide this information.
Roblox has agreed to implement additional protective measures to keep children safe on its platform, such as preventing adults from contacting unknown children without parental consent, strengthening children’s account settings so that accounts are private by default, improving reporting mechanisms, and conducting independent third-party audits to assess the effectiveness of its measures.
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Roblox will have 3 months to implement the changes. If it fails to do so, the eSafety Commissioner will ask the Federal Court to order the company to comply.
“Ultimately, our goal is to drive companies to make their services safer for children and young people. Where safety by design has not been deployed comprehensively at the front end, we won’t hesitate to ensure that these risks have been responsibly remediated,” eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said in a statement.
A Roblox spokesperson told Reuters that the platform had “delivered on the commitments we made to eSafety over the last 12 months and will continue to work towards our shared goal of keeping Australian children safe online.”
In recent years, Roblox has been under scrutiny for doing too little to ensure the safety of children on its platform. Some experts say that Roblox has become the playground for scammers and sexual predators to extort money from children by blackmailing them.
In February 2026, the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) launched a formal investigation into Roblox regarding alleged violent or sexually suggestive games to which minors are exposed.
