Gaming platform Roblox is rolling out a new photo-based age verification tool as part of its effort to step up safety on the platform that is popular with kids. Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki, discusses the move with Caroline Hyde on "Bloomberg Tech."

Roblox, which hosts 150 million daily users, is launching an AI-driven age verification system that uses photo analysis and multiple data signals to estimate users' ages. This initiative aims to prevent minors from communicating with adults and bolster overall platform safety, complementing existing measures such as text filtering and law enforcement cooperation.

The rollout of this system will begin in December and is expected to be completed by January. Roblox believes this approach will provide more accurate age data, benefiting both user safety and advertisers seeking to understand the platform's demographics, especially as the number of older users continues to grow.

Roblox asks users to verify age with photo-based tool

How is this going to be rolling out. Hey great to be here. And what an enormous responsibility with 150 million users every day coming to the platform. We're rolling out what we believe will be the gold standard for the future of Internet safety where the first really major gaming platform to use A.I. to estimate the age of everyone on the platform who wants to use chat and communicate. We're going to start rolling this out in December and then it'll be should be all rolled out by January. Basically on whatever device you're on. Take a quick image. We'll analyze your age with a I compliment it with a bunch of other signals and use that really to figure out who who might you be chatting with to keep the platform more safe. We're not going to be allowing minors for example to communicate with people who are adults. And we're going to roll it out to everyone on the platform. I'm really interested as to how you're going to measure success here Dave because in many ways you're trying to prove a negative. But how do you how are you going to be internally thinking this has worked. People are satisfied and they're safe. Well I want to highlight things are already working in that we're a very unique platform and that we filter all of the text and communication on our platform. We don't allow the sharing of images. We have monitoring for critical harms. We work very closely with law enforcement. So I I see this as an addition to everything we're doing and really to our vision of what we've been calling the gold standard. But we do estimate over the next few months we'll we'll know roughly the age of everyone on the platform and we'll complement that with some of the other things we do like trusted connections and and things like that to constantly build on our innovation. You know we've shipped over 100 safety innovations in the last year. So it's really a continuation of that focus. You're using a third party vendor persona I believe. And how are you going to be ensuring that that's robust enough. The A.I. the underlying technology is robust enough ever in the UK. Well some of them using discord for example have managed to bypass previous facial recognition age verification tests. There's a bunch of other signals we have in addition to the facial age estimation. And we do have the ability to estimate several times if we need to. So so in addition to using the camera to do an age check we have other ways to validate and putting all of these signals together we believe is pretty robust really. What's so interesting is clearly you're here with safety as a priority. You did mention back in the earnings. You see a phone in particular that that maybe you'll see some friction. Maybe the numbers the revenue the growth might be impacted as people start to have to verify their age and maybe slower to come and adopt. Do you think that that will bear out. How will it look longer term. We shared this vision that we believe over 10 percent of the global gaming market which is is somewhere between a 180 and 200 billion dollar market is going to be running on roadblocks. And in the in the earnings call we just had we we shared this amazing growth both on bookings and D.A. use in the 70 percent year on year rate. Long term we we we believe this is just the right thing for the platform. We're unique in that we have all ages. We we have people under 13 over 13 or over 13 is growing rapidly. This is the right long term vision and we're really optimistic about continuing our growth. OK. So this is the right balance from your perspective. What do you think the data will bear out as to the name. Well ultimately the actual ages of people who have using it. Do you think you'll have more under 13. You anticipated you think you have more older users. We can't estimate that exactly. What I can say is that are the facial age estimation tech we're going to use is is pretty reasonable and pretty accurate. I've tried it. My some of my kids have tried it. We've tried it within our staff meeting. So I think we're going to find out we're reasonably close. But over time we will get a better signal on everyone's age. And this must be something that marketeers that those that eventually will buy more ads with roadblocks are going to be looking at. Is this going to help. Well inject some fuel to that offering because people will still feel safer about what age group could be consuming such efforts. We have shared a couple of things. You know we don't target under 18 already on the platform but there's an enormous number of older users joining the platform. We shared in our earnings call I believe in Q4 like we're literally or in Q3 running at over 10 billion hours a month of engagement. That's an amazing amount of engagement. Our economy is primarily driven right now by our our virtual economy powered by robots. But advertising is a wonderful complement. And you're right. We're going to have a better more accurate estimate of everyone's age which for a lot of our advertisers that are starting to hop on with events supporting all kinds of things beauty products movies things like that. They'll have a better idea of really the number of people over 18 on our platform.

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