Is Roblox safe for kids now that it scans their face?
GameStudy • • 6 min read
You have thought about taking Roblox away.
Then you thought about them being the only one in their class who does not play it. So it stayed on the phone. You set a few controls instead and told yourself you would keep an eye on it.
Then Roblox started asking your child to scan their face.
If they got stuck on it and you leaned over and did the scan for them, Roblox has most likely filed their account as an adult’s. Nobody warned you, because the change was reported as a safety upgrade and mostly left there.
Here is what the face scan actually does, the two ways it fails, and what to check tonight.
TLDR
- Roblox now sorts every player into an age band by scanning their face. Chat only works inside your band.
- Do not do the scan for your child. If your face is the one it reads, the account gets treated as an adult, and you can lose your parental controls.
- If the age comes out wrong there is a Reset under their birthday. You get to use it once.
- The band is a guess. Inside whatever room your kid lands in, the chat filter still cannot read a conversation.
What the face scan is supposed to do
Give Roblox this much. No platform that size had ever put chat behind a face check. Instagram has not. TikTok has not. YouTube has not.
Your child scans their face, and Roblox sorts them into one of six bands. Under 9, 9 to 12, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, 18 to 20, and 21 and over. After that they can only chat with people in their own band and nearby ones.
Accounts for 5 to 8 year olds ship with chat off entirely. Nine to twelve get in-game text chat, and direct messages only with approved friends.
The idea is sound. Sort everyone by age, and a forty-year-old cannot open a chat with a ten-year-old.
The mistake that puts your child in the adult section
Your child gets stuck on the scan. You are standing right there. You lean in and do it for them.
Do not.
Childnet, the UK online safety charity, puts it plainly. Complete the age check on behalf of your child and the estimate reads the account as belonging to an adult. Your child gets grouped with players 18 and over, gets access to more mature games, and loses the protections built into children’s accounts.
Roblox’s own guidance is that you should not even be in the camera frame while your child does it.
It gets worse. If the account lands over 18, you lose access to your own parental controls.
The fix, and it is worth knowing before you need it. Go to settings on your child’s account. Underneath their birthday and age group there is a Reset that undoes the age-checked status. You can use it once. After that, correcting the record means sending a government ID.
Go and check which band your child is in tonight. It takes a minute, and most parents have never looked.
What happens when the guess is wrong
It is an estimate, and estimates miss in both directions.
Guess your kid too old and they are in a room with older strangers, which is the exact thing the feature exists to prevent. Parents have reported a ten-year-old read as sixteen.
Guess them too young and they are locked out of their actual friends. One parent found they could no longer chat with their own son after both accounts were checked.
The scan also overrides whatever birthday you entered when you set the account up.
Then there is the part that undoes the whole design. Reporting by Wired found age-verified Roblox accounts listed on eBay within days of the rule taking effect, some verified as young as nine, going for a few dollars. Other users got through the check using drawings rather than a face.
So your child’s band is a guess. The band of whoever is talking to them is also a guess, and it can be bought.
Inside the room, the filter reads one message at a time
Sorting people by age does nothing about what gets said once they are sorted.
Four computer scientists at the University of Arizona and Arizona State screen-recorded 336 hours of play across Brookhaven, Adopt Me!, Royal High and Berry Avenue. They ran text recognition over the video and pulled out 2,040,839 messages from 105,214 players. Every one had already passed the filter.
Their tool flagged more than a thousand conversations as grooming. They hand-checked eighty of those, and fifty-four were the real thing. Alongside it they found sexual content involving minors, threats, bullying, talk of self-harm, and children being asked for their name and their school.
They recorded in the 9+ category as well as the 13+ one.
The reason so much survives is that the filter reads one message at a time. It blocks a banned word, then lets the next message start clean, so anything carried across a conversation walks straight past it. One sentence split over five messages. Numbers standing in for letters. Code words. Deliberate misspellings.
One caveat, then move on. It is a preprint, and the recordings predate the face checks. But the face check changed who is in the room. It did not change the filter.
What to check tonight
None of this needs a weekend.
| Check | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Which age band your child is in | The whole system hangs on this, and it may be wrong. |
| Whether anyone else did their scan | If it reads as an adult, undo it with Reset before you use up the one you get. |
| A linked parent account | Nothing else here works until you have one. |
| Chat with Friends | From age 9. Nine to twelve get trusted friends only. Thirteen to fifteen can open it to all friends. |
| Experience Chat and Direct Chat | Turns off in-game and one-to-one messaging. |
| Content maturity | Caps what your child can open. You can block experiences by name. |
| Connections | Review, block and report everyone on their friend list. |
Checked August 31, 2026, against Roblox’s own documentation and Childnet’s guidance.
Then the conversation, which does more than any setting. Four asks mean close the laptop and come get you. What is your real name. What school do you go to. Where do you live. Come talk to me somewhere else.
That last one matters most. It is how a conversation leaves the only place that has a filter in it.
The one thing you can actually control
Read back over everything above and it is all the same variable. Who else is in the room.
Roblox’s answer is to sort the strangers by age, which is genuinely hard, and which is going wrong in both directions while the filter inside each room stays blind.
There is a cheaper answer for some of the week, and it is not a rule or a timer. Some of your kid’s screen hours can simply be ones with nobody else in them.
We make an English learning app, so read this last bit knowing that. GameStudy is games your kid plays by talking. Every character is an AI on a private server. No lobby, no strangers, no band to be sorted into, and no filter to get around, because there is nobody else in there to get around it.
Apple rates it 4+ and it is free to start on iPhone. It has no parental controls at all, no dashboard and no reports, so those still live in Screen Time on the phone.
It does not replace Roblox and it is not meant to. Their friends are still over there, and that was always the point.
“My son was addicted to Roblox, and it used to worry me. Now he’s learning English while he plays games, so I feel very relieved! He finds GameStudy as fun as Roblox, so he mostly plays on GameStudy now.”
You are not going to win this by counting hours. You can win some of them back by choosing which ones have a stranger in them!