Australian regulator urges online gaming giants to strengthen child safety measures
CANBERRA: Australia's online safety regulator has called for online gaming service providers, including Roblox and Fortnite, to strengthen protections against child sexual exploitation.
Julie Inman Grant, Australia's eSafety Commissioner, on Friday released a report showing significant differences in the child-safety measures taken by game service providers.
The report found that the providers behind Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft and Steam have inconsistent approaches to preventing high-risk games from being accessed by children, warning that such games can create environments for child sexual exploitation or activity that promotes crime or violence.
"Australian children have a right to play online without being exposed to predators, sexual extortionists, violent extremist content or other harmful material," Inman Grant said.
"Service providers should leverage systems that actually detect and disrupt serious harms before children are exposed to them."
According to the report, the providers of both Fortnite and Minecraft offer protections for child accounts, but generally rely on age information declared by users, allowing users who stated they were adults to access higher-risk features without additional age checks.
It said that Valve, the provider of the game-distribution platform Steam, failed to use tools to proactively detect harms on the messaging service Steam Chat.
Roblox and Valve reported using only internal datasets to train language-detection systems, with neither regularly retraining those models.
Inman Grant said that it is critical for game service providers to adopt meaningful and continuing safety measures to protect young players.
