Gaming platform Roblox introduced three new parental control features on Wednesday, giving adults direct authority to block specific experiences and dangerous contacts following heavy scrutiny over child safety risks, including grooming, violence, and explicit material.
Identity Verification and System Access
The rollout enforces a stricter safety protocol across the preteen-focused platform, expanding on policy changes made over the past year due to allegations of inadequate protections for young users. To activate the new feature suite, parents must first link their own Roblox account to their child’s account, completing an identity check via photo ID or credit card before managing preferences inside the “Parental Controls” menu.
Direct Interventions for Friend Lists and Messaging
While previous tools allowed parents to monitor who their children were connected with, the updated system provides actionable blocking capabilities. Parents can now directly flag and block users on their child’s friends list, cutting off direct messaging capabilities from accounts deemed hazardous. Children under the age of 13 are restricted from overriding these blocked accounts independently, though they retain an option to submit an unblock request to their parent.
Granular Game Blocking and Activity Tracking
In addition to social controls, the platform offers precise, item-level content restrictions beyond standard maturity ratings. Parents can now block access to specific games entirely. Children can view these restricted titles within their interface and submit a permission request if they wish to regain access.
To complement content restrictions, the dashboard provides increased activity transparency by listing the top 20 experiences a child has played over the previous week, ranked by total time spent. This feature builds upon Roblox’s previously introduced tools that enable parents to track gameplay duration and configure daily screen time caps.
Leave a Reply