Roblox is an actively predatory marketplace for parent’s credit details.
If people care so much about their children they should probably focus on actual problems that are threatening their entire futures…
I cared so much about my kids’ futures I didn’t even have any. It was the only way to ensure their happiness and safety.
People will do anything these days to avoid actually parenting.
The audience for this isn’t even really parents of young children, it is mostly grandparents who vote as large blocs and are rather receptive to the ‘save the kids’ message in order to support whatever restrictions on technology they don’t understand anyway.
Okay so… all the people who are saying “supervise your kid”. Keep in mind that a lot of parents aren’t tech savvy. So often they don’t know the difference from a basic single player no online game and something where you interact with strangers. And the parental controls on every system are different. So it ends up being an all or nothing choice for these parents.
Add to that, kids these days socialize online a lot. My teen plays lots of teamwork games with her irl friends. And that is great for the development of social skills.
I happen to work from home, and in tech, so I am usually in the same room on a computer. Easy supervision. But other parents don’t have it so easy.
Keep in mind that a lot of parents aren’t tech savvy
This is a choice that they make. Just like they choose to have children, they could choose to educate themselves on how better to supervise them. But they don’t want to, because it’s easier to blame externalities.
Yeah. No. Not everyone has the ability to be tech savvy.
On top of that, the controls are very weak. I’m very tech savvy, and there are things I can’t stop my kids from doing on their devices. Mainly because the device maker isn’t incentivized to make it possible for the control software to stop those things. It always sounds good on paper, but when you try to actually use it, you find out how bad it really is. Plus, each game has it’s own set of controls, and then each device…
It’s fucking 2026. Not tech savvy? That’s on them.
You do realize plenty of them were born and raised without the internet, right? There is a big difference between people raised with the internet and those not. Plus, parental controls are not even an after thought for must companies. They are a “we need something to claim we have parental controls”. Most of them just plain suck. Then you have different controls for different games, and different devices… even the tech savvy struggle. Plus the controls often have easy workarounds.
Again, it is 2026. Who the fuck is having kids now that was born and raised without the internet? Do the math on that.
Ah fair enough then, let’s instead have invasive ID checks on every single online thing so nobody can have privacy online.
Id checks don’t do anything. They are a joke to fake. I was just responding to all the people who think it’s so easy to “just supervise” your kids. They probably don’t have kids.
Maybe you should try parenting???
Also: Little kids aren’t even allowed to use Steam, check the TOS. If parents abandon their responsibilities to their own children, that’s hardly Steam’s fault.
For anyone that doesn’t know, currently because of stuff like this, people in Australia can’t even access their Steam games that they’ve already bought unless they have a credit card, which I’ve learned most people over there don’t. Valve isn’t allowing the third-party ‘steal your data’ options like face scan and government ID, so Australian folk without a CC are out of luck.
Australians, please fight back against these anti-privacy laws. If these are successful, they’ll come to other countries.
You are completely wrong.
Credit cards are very common here. Also, I don’t have a credit card and I haven’t lost access to any of my steam games.
I’ve played games like Wuthering Waves and VPN’d to America and the game has asked me to verify my age then I’ve disabled the VPN and started the game again and magically it’s not now.
I don’t know what to tell you, I got my information from an Australian, and everything I’ve seen online confirms this.
I’m an Australian
I don’t know an adult Australian who doesn’t at least have a Visa debit card, which more or less functions as the same.
Many use EFTPOS (and quite frankly our government should move that to a credit payment facility so we can ditch the American ones) but what that Aussie told you is not correct; in fact most of the larger retailers are pushing for cashless transactions.
Total tangent here… austrailians don’t have credit cards? Tell me more, I am very curious.
Credit cards are mostly a US thing. Most other places you just use debit cards.
Credit cards are of course used worldwide but most people don’t own one and those who do use it rarely, since why would you borrow money to pay for something unless it’s an emergency or some big / long term thing (at which point an actual loan is probably better, so again CC not needed).
Debit cards make sense. Though I would expect those to be usable as CCs for the verification part.
I’m not sure the reason, but my guess is that a child can own a debit card, but can’t own a credit card.
At least in my corner of the world, debit cards can be used anywhere online that requires credit cards, but at least some banks disable it by default so you have to enable online payments. 15 -20 years ago it was different and you HAD to have a credit card to buy shit off Amazon or Steam so most kids couldn’t get shit.
I’m not an expert, I’m just being told this from an Australian. They do have credit cards, but it’s not as much a necessity to do things as it is in North America. So, from what I’m told, a lot of adults don’t have one.
Does Australia not have parents?
No, parents don’t parent anywhere anymore. It is the government’s job now.
Sadly I think you are right about the majority of people.
Personally I try my best but it’s exhausting :/
Oh fuck off. You can’t build a foolproof solution and you know it, you’re just asking for more power over our data and I’m so tired of it.
This is being said in a world where parents just give their kids tablets so they can keep quiet/busy. IMO the real danger is kids having “smart” tech at a young age. I almost think it’s borderline child abuse to get them hooked on tech that early on.
I fully concur that the onus is on the parents first, not the platforms.
However I also think that there should be proper tools made available for parents to simplify managing what their kids can access.
No, not the Orwellian surveillance crap most politicians try to push. Those don’t help.
But having a proper parental control system that has pre-made filters and is straightforward to use would get us ahead quite a lot.
About ten years ago I had to be the “parent” for my youngest brother on a number of platforms because our parents speak no English and parental controls were all… only in English.
Just last year I did the same for my nieces. And let me tell you… in ten years there was exactly zero progress made in parental control systems at Google, Microsoft and Apple. No ways to make it easier to control what your kids can access, no improvements in UX, it’s still a hidden, tucked away, third or fourth thought menu.
Maybe start focusing on that instead of trying to use your incompetence to strongarm governments into handing you even more data? Just an idea.
In my age it was the TV.
So not really much changed.We had this discussions decades ago. Edit: BTW I agree with you. And If I think about it, with internet its worse for obvious reasons, predators, uploading personal media, data collection in general, and for the algorithms of social media and sharing platforms. And available at anytime and any place, so you are hooked without oversight. Alright, a lot has changed!Yeah but research shows that even TV isn’t great for young kids. Especially if it isn’t supervised and time limited.
Exactly. This is what has been told for decades since I was a child. But back then most households had only one TV, at most two. Today I think its just worse in every way.
Does she even know what she is talking about? Steam isn’t allowed to be used and registered by childs (note, “Subscriber” in this context means Steam user account): https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/
You may not become a Subscriber if you are under the age of 13. Steam is not intended for children under 13 and Valve will not knowingly collect personal information from children under the age of 13. Additional age restrictions may apply in your country.
Oh it just occurred to me why Minecraft and Roblox aren’t on Steam (besides the 30% price cut). They can’t, because the games allow children to login and play, while this is not allowed in Steam.
Australia is pathetic when it comes to freedom of speech. The media censorship is outrageous, meanwhile the far right has captured journalism
I was going to argue but actually yeah that’s about right. That’s a real shame.
You have my sympathies. My country is worse, I’m sure.
FUCKING
SUPERVISE
YOUR OWN
CHILDREN
I gotta be honest, I understand this position. I have a real difficult kid. We’re working on building trust, but it’s a process. The fact of the matter is that he seeks out inappropriate content and he can’t seem to help himself, just too impulsive.
There’s a reason for these behaviors, and like I said, we’re working on it. But in the mean time, we’ve had to completely lock down all technology in the house. And most of it is complete garbage when it comes to parental controls. Stay away from Roku for instance, that device is fucking horrible, just the worst.
Anyway, the thing is, sometimes parental controls are in fact necessary, but as long as they exist, things are fine. Steam for instance has a great system, you can control what aspects of steam a kid has access to, multiplayer functionality, the store, online content, etc. a all that can be switched on or off. And for games you can use their general rating system (which is imperfect) or you can manually whitelist individual games. Finally, you can lock it all behind a simple pin code. Honestly, this is how all such platforms should work, it’s manageable.
I don’t think there’s really any legitimate reason to complain about the systems steam currently has in place.
Roblox on the other hand… That’s a shitshow. We don’t touch Roblox. And it probably shouldn’t be allowed to operate the way it does.
These people are NOT talking about parental control, they are talking about taking control over what children have access to regardless of what specific parents think. If your child were less impulsive, as most children are, you wouldn’t have to be that restrictive - some common sense rules and limits would probably suffice, and these things are important to both build trust and develop responsibility in most children.
But they want to do the same with children online as they did with public spaces starting decades ago - taking away the possibility of experiencing the world on their own terms in adequate environments for those children who are capable of it. They are already taking away their communication channels on a large scale in addition to deanonymizing their citizens on the internet, and now they are still pushing for more.
The parental controls on Steam are absolutely fine, and there’s even the possibility of setting the account into offline mode or needing approval for every single login on the parents phone if they want to. Roblox… is a completely different can of worms, and i would never allow my child a roblox account, because normalizing what is going on there is a very bad idea.
Don’t let yourself get fooled. They want to decide how much you can trust your children, regardless of how good a parent you are or how well behaved you child is.
It’s not Australia saying it, it’s a specific person, though.
Who is american…
The gap is parents supervising their children if anything.
