1 day Ago
Gaming platform Roblox has announced new safety tools which will allow parents to block people from their child’s friend list, as well as block individual experiences on the popular site. The platform, which is hugely popular among younger gamers, is also introducing insights which will show parents which games and experiences their children have spent the most time on. Roblox said the update was aimed at giving greater flexibility to parents to manage their children’s activity on the site.
The safety features follow a range of major updates rolled out last year to better allow parents to manage and monitor their children’s accounts, and came after reports criticised the firm’s approach to safety. Matt Kaufman, Roblox’s chief safety officer, told the PA news agency the platform was “constantly improving the safety systems on Roblox” and the aim for the company was to create safety features that could “adapt with the times”. “The updates this week are a continuation of the pretty much full revamp of parental controls that we started in November of last year,” he told PA.
“It’s reflective of the fact that we are constantly improving the safety systems on Roblox. I think last year we made about 40 major improvements, and that’s just continuing into 2025. “It’s something that you have to constantly invest in, and I attribute the perspective of the way Roblox operates in the safety space to the founders.
“I think they really established an ethos of how we operate as a company, and I do think that’s something that sets us apart. “So now, roll forward almost 20 years when we think about safety at Roblox, it’s really something that almost everybody at Roblox is thinking about and working on – and there’s a dedicated safety team, which is fairly large here, and our job is to focus on this every day and constantly improve the system. “We aspire to build systems that are more and more sophisticated and can adapt with the times.
I think that’s our aspiration. I think the responsible thing though, is to just understand that these systems take constant investment in time and technology.” The updates to Roblox come as online safety, particularly that of children, becomes an increasing area of focus following the pandemic and the additional time children spend online learning and socialising virtually, but as more aspects of daily life become digital-focused.
Mr Kaufman said the platform was hearing from parents now, but said he believed this not solely because of changing attitudes to online safety. “We are having more conversations with parents. I would like to note, though, that I’m not sure if it’s because of attitude shifts or the fact that Roblox just continues to grow and the platform is more and more ubiquitous, and so I think that there’s more and more people who understand what it is,” he said.
“I do think that there are parents who are very engaged, and I think those discussions that we have with them about how we can keep kids safe and what our responsibility is and how we want to engage parents, I think is really good. I think it helps inform how we think about building things.” He added that as well as giving parents flexibility to set the controls that were suitable for their child, it was important to recognise different families had different needs, there were also things the platform should do “by default”.
Last year, Roblox made it a default setting that children under 13 could not chat to others outside of games, or direct message other players until they had parental approval. “I think our perspective is we need to be safe by default, and we know that there’s lots of people on the platform – kids on the platform – who have parents who are just really busy; parents and caregivers,” Mr Kaufman said. “They have a lot of things going on.
There’s sometimes other kids that they’re managing, after school activities, their own work, other things like that. “And our perspective, and really our perspective from the start, is that we need to keep everybody safe, no matter what age they tell us when they come onto the platform. “We just need to make safety a priority.
And while we do have parental controls, and we do want to engage in these conversations with parents, we also know that there is some stuff that we just need to do by default and and that’s how we we operate.”.
