Hi, I’m a very privacy minded individual. Today Roblox is pushing out a new Privacy policy which does the following things:
Data will now be sold
Everybody’s favorite things - data selling! Roblox is now reserving the right to resell and/or share your data for advertising purposes to third parties:
Feeding data to AI
As states here, they now have the right to give your content up to AI (it says opt in but they didnt really need to clarify it if the old one wasnt an issue with how opting in worked):
Note that I am not a lawyer so I could be confused by some wording - but if what I’m reading is right then this isn’t ok. I do not want my data sold and I am not ok with my data being sold (especially to advertisers), no thanks. Maybe it’s also just worded poorly because Roblox has a thing for that.
New ToU looks fine… for the most part from me at least. Just please do not move forward with this AI training and data selling thing… it’s super invasive and if I can prevent it I will.
I am not alright with ROBLOX violating my privacy and taking information from me that may put me or anyone else in danger of ROBLOX getting hacked and our information stolen. ROBLOX is responsible for this and should be keeping our information protected. Otherwise ROBLOX can or could be ended up getting lawsuits for violating them.
Technically not, since the whole point of updating a privacy policy is to make it clear what their stance is legally on using user data for AI purposes. When the policy change does go into effect, everyone trying to log in to Roblox should be faced with a notice and asked to agree to continue, thus nullifying legal responsibility. In layman terms, it’s either you quit Roblox or move on.
My stance on that while a default opt-in would be acceptable, an opt-out should be provided to give more privacy for the user.
So your okay with ROBLOX taking control of underage children? they don’t know any better to what their agreeing to. ROBLOX does not have the right to take control of peoples personal information. And it shouldn’t force people to quit ROBLOX.
This is how corporations fall, they all rise up and get too greedy they go bankrupt. imagine how much ROBLOX is going to lose from the all the lawsuits.
I’m going to talk to some legal attorneys and have them look at the Privacy policy and see if it violates any laws or not under privacy laws.
That’s not true, they’re not allowed to sell data from people <13. I’m just calling this a privacy violation because I’m not ok with having my data sold and I’ll do anything in my power to stop it.
This only applies to UGC, which requires ID verification or being previously certified under the program. Underage users cannot be “taken control” of with this change because they cannot upload UGC in the first place, unless they commit forgery, which is their own liability.
I agree with the data-selling being bad, disagree about the opt-in ai data usage being bad. Data-selling is uncomfortable, opt-in ai data usage is just trying to improve their technology.
Ugh. Ew. have already had to deal with stuff like this, every other website that has tried to implement AI scraping has had an option to opt out, Laws haven’t exactly gone into place yet (at least not in the US) but they’re asking to be sued if someone’s stuff is taken without permission, it’d be a better decision to give us the chance to opt out, just to ensure no legal trouble comes from it.
EDIT: Yeah, selling our PURPOSEFULLY private assets is definitely asking for a lawsuit, hopefully the men in suits wise up and at least give us an option to, or someone is gonna come knocking eventually. It’s just the right thing to do as far as morals and good business goes.
AI is far from a step in the right direction. It creates a way for devs to just be lazy and produce less than satisfactory content.
As confident as I am in AI, I doubt it’s ever replacing human work in the art / GFX field. Typing a prompt can’t ever reach the artistic touch a real human provides. It’s too unpredictable to actually be consistent and useful. Besides, AI rarely ever produces something good anyways.
This policy change does not change any of that. Change or not, if Roblox gets hacked, you’re toast, and they’ll be equally as liable for damages now and in the future. No difference between now and then.
From the legal standpoint, you are free to do two things:
Refuse the new policy: Send an e-mail to Roblox to let them know you refuse this new policy. THIS WILL LEAD TO YOUR ACCOUNT BEING DELETED Accept the new policy (default): You waive your rights to suing them for selling your data against your consent since you’ve given them consent.
I’m not an AI enthusiast. It probably is coming for the job of some of my best friends, and then for mine. Nevertheless… we did go from Cleverbot the Idiot, to ChatGPT, Midjourney, and GPT-4o in under 3 years.
AI is far from being done in improving. Eventually it will reach a point where not only it can make decent enough content that 50%+ will be okay with it, and it’ll allow for modifications to an existing generated work.
There will still be a market for fine human art, but it’lll be seen as an object of wealth and of superior quality, akin to a swiss watch, something that you can get for cheaper and a little bit less good, but that you get to show you’re wealthy or because you have a passion for it.
I do think that AI in its current progression is the doom of most jobs on Earth, except ones that REQUIRE a human (teaching, nursing…), but that is not until a long while.
Roblox is a megacorp, they would not do this AI nonsense if they didn’t run it past an army of lawyers and bean counters telling them it’s legal and profitable, and this is clearly the next step from their earlier procedural generation nonsense. As for the data selling, well, the US is big enough it is profitable to run a branch of European Union compliant services and a branch of American compliant services - so until we get an American GDPR megacorps being megacorps will simply tailor things on a per state basis. (Fire up a VPN, connect to germany, and load up google. All of the sudden you have far more privacy options, up front, without needing to dig through multiple sub menus and weird wording.)
The sad truth is the selling of data, especially for advertisements, remains profitable, and is likely never going to end. This is why I run adblock and encourage everyone else to also use adblock. It’s as close as you will get to voting with your wallet against this nonsense. If you can, run a PiHole for even more adblock across your entire network.
If you happen to be skilled in network administration and posses a proper hardware firewall you can do what I do and go much further in blocking ads and trackers. This is involving things like deep packet inspection. For most people this is overkill, for me it is more resume experience and a hobby. Be warned, such firewalls are pricey.
I am going to vouch for this quickly. Roblox has a thing for telemetry and in other words stalking you and a Pi-hole server is not hard to set up and will save you so much privacy. Roblox is at the very top of my top blocked list:
I think both of these updates are ludicrous, and should not be implemented. If someone wants to have their data sold, then that should also be an opt-in, or at the very least opt-out.
THIS WILL LEAD TO YOUR ACCOUNT BEING DELETED 