Roblox decided to make their game more privacy invading by requiring facial recognition scans for age verification purposes.
There was a time when trying to respect people’s privacy online was seemingly baked in. The standard wisdom, once upon a time, was that you never use your real name online.
In the years since, I’ve witnessed the gradual unravelling of privacy. Social media platforms forbid using pen names, putting where you live online was actually encouraged (seriously, WTF?), posting pictures of yourself was normalized, and people were also encouraged to post evidence of where they are at all times with pictures and video. Some platforms joined in, implementing measures that would allow advertisers to micro-target users based on their search and content consumption history and even, track where they are across the web in real time. This gave rise to the term “surveillance capitalism” where things can get so bad, children can have their real time GPS position tracked and recorded. Thanks to things like this, SWATting has become a thing and insurance companies trolling through your history is now becoming the expected norm. I think it’s safe to say the people of the 90s internet would be shocked to see how bad things have gotten over 30 years later online.
Today, privacy of any kind is seen as a major obstacle both for commercial companies and government alike. If you didn’t want to use your real name online, or you wanted to keep your communications private, you are sometimes seen as an outlier and, dare I say, a weirdo. This despite this kind of ask becoming increasingly a more and more reasonable ask. In fact, sometimes when people find out you use something like a VPN, there are going to be those who seemingly suspect that you must be some kind of criminal even though people use VPNs for a whole variety of perfectly legitimate reasons. Seriously, it can be little more than a personal preference and that’s fine.
One of the movements that has been particularly disturbing is the rise of facial recognition scanning. As early as the 2020’s, even mentioning the use of such technology was seen as shocking and cause for immediate questions as to what privacy safeguards are in place so that your face doesn’t get added to such a database. Now? It’s so baked into the system that people generally are expected to submit your face to an unknown database with the hopes that it doesn’t get sold off to some shady data broker afterwards. All this for what? To find out that he service afterwards sucks and was not worth using? Probably.
Even worse is the fact that government is using the technology with highly questionable accuracy to determine aspects of your life – particularly age. This as part of increasing mandates to lock down the internet and make it increasingly difficult to access the wide open web without first submitting huge amounts of personal information to, at the very least, a shady third party. This is thanks to terrible age verification laws that are backed by the obviously fake premise of protecting the children from “explicit” content. This with efforts by government to move beyond just “porn sites” implementing such technology and moving towards implementing such technology to video games, app stores, social media, and search engines. This with the much more “liberal” idea that if a service can be reasonably be expected to be used by a minor, then such surveillance requirements must be placed on them – a very far removed demand from the idea that if your website mostly consists of “explicit” content, then you should be expected to put such “protections” (the technology is the exact opposite of that) in place.
Frighteningly enough, web services have started implementing such technology without a fight, opting to throw their user base under the bus and offloading the liability on some random third party before dusting their hands of it. Recently, Reddit began implementing age verification for UK users. This even as the company used a company, Persona to be precise, is sparking questions of whether or not is GDPR compliant or not with the personal information they get from users. Gone are the days where websites fought against bad laws that negatively impacted their users (i.e. SOPA) it seems.
Reddit, for their part, used some pretty slippery language to try and ease concerns. Specifically, they argued that Reddit is not seeking to have users reveal their identities in any way and that the policy they are implementing doesn’t change that. The problem isn’t whether Reddit is seeking to obtain identities of users, but rather, the requirement that users submit huge amounts of personal information at all – especially to a third party. What is that third party really going to do with that information when there is such a huge value tied to said personal information in the first place? What’s more, what if that information was hacked? After all, black hat hackers would no doubt salivate over how much money they would get if they manage to steal such a huge and highly valued database in the first place. Reddit still bears some responsibility for that because they are actively requiring users of certain subreddits to submit such information in the first place.
While it is bad enough that Reddit is just throwing users under the bus, it appears that they aren’t the only ones doing this. Roblox, a hugely popular sandbox game, is making similar demands of its own users. From Engadget:
Roblox is joining the growing ranks of online platforms that are trying to better understand the ages of their teen users. The company is rolling out a new “age estimation” feature for teens 13 and older.
With the update, teens will be prompted for an age check that requires a video selfie in order to access its new less restrictive chat feature called “trusted connections.” Roblox is relying on third-party identity company Persona for the actual “estimation,” and users who fail the check will also have the option of providing an ID. Once teens have “unlocked” trusted connections via video selfie or sharing an ID, they’ll be able to participate in chats with friends “without filters,” including “party” group text and voice chats.
“We believe chat without filters should only be accessible to users who have verified their age.” the company writes in a blog post. “This isn’t just about compliance; it’s about building engaging and appropriate digital spaces for everyone.”
What is noticeable in the report notes that Persona is also being used. This is the same company Reddit is using. At minimum, this tells us that multiple major platforms are using the same service to have huge amounts of highly sensitive personal information stockpiled into this one company at least (or, at least, is sending huge amounts of data to this one company).
At minimum, it’s disappointing that any web company is doing this. Given the last several years that led up to it, it’s also partly unsurprising given that there has been that constant erosion of respect for privacy. It doesn’t make this backslide any better, obviously, but it seems that privacy of any kind is not something that is very well respected these days.
looking into it they used this system for other things before and was already in Roblox. they just expanded it.
Honestly age verification has been popping up in various social games for a while. I know I got word about VRChat getting it too a year ago.