Revealing Reality created multiple Roblox accounts, registering them to fictional users aged five, nine, 10, 13 and 40-plus. The accounts interacted only with one another, and not with users outside the experiment, to ensure their avatars’ behaviours were not influenced in any way.
Despite new tools launched last week aimed at giving parents more control over their children’s accounts, the researchers concluded: “Safety controls that exist are limited in their effectiveness and there are still significant risks for children on the platform.”
The report found that children as young as five were able to communicate with adults while playing games on the platform, and found examples of adults and children interacting with no effective age verification. This was despite Roblox changing its settings last November so that accounts listed as belonging to under-13s can no longer directly message others outside of games or experiences, instead having access only to public broadcast messages.
I plan to do the same with my kid as my parents did: PC in the living room. That way I can at least keep an eye on what they are doing. I haven’t figured out what to do about smart phones yet, but I got at least 8 years before that becomes an issue.
android with lineage on it, and configure things to limit what they can do with it.
you can get pretty close to the best of both worlds, letting them have navigation tools and whatnot while also simply not having the google play store available on the phone at all, and exposing them to a very minimal amount of data harvesting from the tech companies.