Roblox's facial age recognition system faces backlash over inaccuracies

Roblox’s new facial verification system is doing something nobody expected: it can’t actually tell how old people are.

Over the past few days, players have been flooding Reddit and X with stories about the platform’s age estimation going completely sideways. Adults are getting tagged as teenagers. Teenagers are being marked as adults. And in one particularly absurd case, a 16-year-old who’s already growing a beard couldn’t get the system to recognize him as 13 or older at all.

The verification feature is part of Roblox’s plan to restrict communication between adults and minors, which sounds good on paper. Users take a video selfie, and the system analyzes it to estimate whether they’re under 13, between 13-17, or 18 and up. But the execution has been rough. Really rough.

One player ran a test with an account set to their real birthday, making them 20 years old. The system placed them in the 13+ category instead of 18+.

That’s not just an oops moment. It means adults could potentially slip into spaces meant for younger users, which is literally the problem Roblox was trying to fix. In the same thread, one user noted that they are 17 but got pegged as 21, while another player said they are a minor but got into the 18+ age group.

Similarly, there is a separate post where one user who claims to be 20 got verified in the 13+ group.

Roblox uses technology from Persona, a third-party verification company, which analyzes selfies against a massive dataset. Many other platforms, including the likes of Character AI, are also using the same tech. The company announced back in September that facial age estimation would roll out to all users by the end of 2025. They framed it as a safety measure, part of their response to mounting criticism about predators on the platform. Louisiana’s Attorney General is even suing them over child safety failures.

But here’s the thing: when your safety system can’t reliably tell a 20-year-old from a 13-year-old, it’s not really keeping anyone safe. And players are finding that out fast. Some have figured out they can fool the system by holding up pictures of movie or game characters to the camera. If it’s that easy to bypass, what’s the point?

What really bothers users is that Roblox isn’t giving them much choice. Some players are finding their chat features disabled entirely until they verify, cutting them off from friends they’ve played with for years.

Roblox says users can verify through government ID if the facial scan doesn’t work, but plenty of people aren’t comfortable handing over that information just to chat in a game. And honestly, if you’re the exact age you claim to be and the system still can’t figure it out, why should you have to?

That said, feel free to share your experience with the system in the comments section below.