Australia's eSafety regulator finds Roblox still allows adult contact with children despite prior safety measures

Australia's eSafety regulator conducted testing this year and concluded that Roblox "continued to put children at risk, including allowing contact between children and adult strangers." The specific failures are concrete: adults could send connection requests to young children without parental consent, children and adults could interact on forums outside game environments without consent, and children's profiles, connections, and biographical information were visible to anyone on the platform with no option to restrict that visibility. These are not abstract concerns but documented gaps in access control and privacy defaults.

Roblox's position, as relayed by eSafety, is that it already meets its obligations under Australia's Online Safety Act. This creates a direct disagreement between the regulator's findings and the company's self-assessment. The planned changes, preventing adults from contacting unknown children without parental consent, making children's accounts private by default, adding accessible reporting with outcome notifications, and engaging an independent third-party auditor to assess safety measures including age-estimation deployment, suggest Roblox is responding to regulatory pressure even while disputing the premise.

For engineers and platform operators, the findings highlight a recurring pattern: safety features that exist on paper but fail in practice when tested against specific adversarial scenarios. The ability for adults to send unsolicited connection requests to children, and the absence of any visibility restriction on child profiles, point to gaps in default configuration and permission modeling rather than missing functionality. The independent audit requirement means Roblox's safety architecture will now be assessed by an external party against effectiveness criteria, not just compliance checklists.

The broader regulatory context extends beyond Australia. Roblox is under investigation by a US Senate subcommittee and has faced lawsuits from multiple states over alleged child safety issues, settling some of them. This means the pressure on Roblox's safety design is multi-jurisdictional, and changes made to satisfy eSafety could become relevant to US proceedings as well. However, only one feed carried this story, so the analysis is limited to The Verge's reporting and cannot be corroborated against additional independent coverage.