Roblox has agreed to independent audits and court-enforceable changes after Australia's eSafety commissioner found persistent gaps in its child protection measures. Despite updates last fall, adult strangers could still send connection requests to children, whose profile information remained visible to all users without restriction options. These requests did not trigger parental alerts, and adults could search and comment on children's posts in non-game forums without consent.

eSafety's testing revealed that Roblox cannot be trusted to independently verify compliance with Australia's Online Safety Act, which mandates preventing unwanted adult-minor contact and setting children's accounts to private by default. The platform, used by 1.7 million Australian kids, must implement changes within three months including preventing adult-to-child contact without parental consent.

The agreement marks the first time Australia has required third-party auditing under the Online Safety Act. eSafety warned Roblox last October about ongoing child exploitation concerns and threatened penalties up to $49.5 million. Roblox's facial age estimation system, which has processed 338 million records, will also be audited to ensure proper age verification.

Roblox's spokesperson stated the company has delivered on safety commitments including new Roblox Kids and Select accounts for under-16s. However, eSafety remains cautious, planning to audit age estimation tools and release a transparency report later this year on platforms' child safety efforts.