Visit someone’s profile, what do you see? Their stylish avatar, favorite experiences, and… Entire social circle? All you need to do is sign up for a Roblox account, and you have access to anyone’s friends list.
If someone wants to harass you, and you’ve locked up your social media, they can move on to attacking your friends.
If someone wants to stalk you, they can follow your friends in-game on the chance that they’ll bump into you.
If someone wants to attack you, they can trick your friends into sharing little details until they’ve built a record of your personal info.
These aren’t hypotheticals on a platform where developers make millions of dollars a year, Video Stars influence millions of subscribers, and millions of kids play daily. We’ve seen how rotten the worst people on the internet can be, why are we making it easier for them to hurt us?
Please give us control over who gets to see our friends and groups!
Not the smartest solution, you won’t be able to play with your friends then.
Nevertheless, new privacy features are a good idea, maybe the friends part at least.
Although, if you’re able to hide every little detail about your profile, it won’t really be much of a profile anymore, at the end of the day, people visit your profile to learn about you.
Now whether you like that or not, it doesn’t really matter, and if your joins are off, and they do end up joining your friends, they can also turn their joins off if it bothers them.
Unfortunately, I doubt this could be implemented without breaking a ton of experiences that rely upon the friends and groups feature.
No offence, but if your issue is with your friends being practically socially manipulated into sharing your personal information, will hiding your friend list even fix the issue? Many of your friends may not hide their friend list, and if they are any bit somewhat popular, the malicious user now has a confirmed friend, which they can still socially manipulate. Just before it is suggested, creating an inaccurate friend list that hides ‘private users’ would just cause even more confusion.
This also isn’t discussed in your post, but why would you need to hide your Roblox groups? If you are doing something ‘secretive’ for a group, an alt should suffice in most cases. Not only that, but it also solves the unlikely scenario that someone randomly stumbles across the group.
Overall, I don’t exactly support this feature. If someone sent me a friend request and had private friends and private groups, I’d be almost concerned that they are running some sort of malicious group. Having this transparency of friends and groups gives a little bit of peace of mind. Removing these lists via a setting would not only create a ton of compatibility issues across a ton of experiences, but it would also remove that bit of transparency that we still have. You can always know if someone you know is friended to someone who harases you and hence why you may not want to friend them, there are two sides to the coin.
I think there’s a pretty big difference between the effort needed to piecemeal together part of my friends list, and handing over the entire thing at the click of a button. Not everyone on my friends list is going to be a major creator with millions of views either. Some of us want to add our younger family members as friends on Roblox, and they would be much bigger targets for manipulation and harassment.
Groups are used for a lot more than being a container for gamedev teams. Fan groups, war clans, friend circles, and more. They’re not as common as they used to be years ago, but it’s still a feature I see used for small friend groups to share what they love.
Experiences could either only have access to info from anyone directly in the server, like with badges, or ask for players to give permission to access their friends and groups, like with inventories. Both have their ups and downs, but I’d be curious if you believe there’s any incompatible use case that’s more important than our privacy.
Many studiesshow thatmost people prefer to keep their social lives private. Much like people private their Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platform accounts, people would most prefer to private their Roblox accounts as well and this would overall be a massively positive change to the platform.
Roblox is becoming an increasingly social platform. I know many of my younger relatives have friendships and connections formed solely on Roblox, and use it as the primary area to hang out and talk with those friends. It isn’t any secret that the internet is full of extremely predatory people that love to take advantage of those who are vulnerable, having privacy options for profiles will help in combatting that by restricting the amount of information bad actors can access and utilize.
For Developers, perhaps a new API can be introduced similar to that of CanSendGameInviteAsync? Something along the lines of CanQueryFriendsAsync, which would tell developers if they’re allowed to view that user’s friends list or not. There isn’t really a downside (on our ends) to introducing this besides having to make another API call, but good design will prevent any issues caused by that from arising (i.e. proper error handling and exponential back-off until a successful response is received).
I didn’t exactly mean that these cases are “more important than your privacy”, I did however mean that changing this now would cause massive backwards compatibility issues. Experiences that rely on this behaviour would entirely break into pieces and since this would be a functionality change, it would cause much more disruption than many other changes that have been proposed in the past. Stuff like inventory privacy (and the badge example you gave, which FYI badge-award status does not have this limitation on the website) only works well because you have never been able to retrieve this information in an experience before the privacy restriction. Therefore all experiences were built with this limitation in mind and never expanded into use-cases that required relaxed privacy settings. Changing this functionality now is going to cause massive friction and issues for any experience who doesn’t want to update or which include features that simply can’t comply with such restrictions.
For example, my experience includes a custom world for each Roblox group and “friend circle” (IE: mutuals). I also store player models of anyone who has accessed each of those worlds with-in the world in a sort of “gallery”. However I also need to be able to remove the player model if the player is unfriended or exiled from the group. With either approach (same-server only / permission based) this ends up being impossible to do as a player may revoke permission (which I assume you would also want) or the player may not ever join the experience again.
I would assume that for “fan groups” and “war clans”, having your groups as public would not be much of an issue (especially since you are proposing a single toggle for privacy) however I do understand your case for friend circles. Is there any reason why you would use groups for this, is there a group functionality that benefits these use-cases? Not to sound harsh or anything, just genuinely curious.
Thank you, I didn’t quite put together what that phrase was trying to say originally mainly because I wrote my reply early in the morning.
For the handful of Experiences where having access to players’ friends list is core to gameplay, it’s Roblox’s job to figure out how to implement this change as smoothly as possible. If children’s safety comes down to a few games needing to rework friend features, in my opinion that’s the right choice.
PlayerOwnsAsset has been around for at least a decade, and UserHasBadgeAsync was only used as an example on how Roblox could potentially implement privacy changes while still keeping a lot of friend/group related features functional. The fact Roblox’s web API bypasses inventory privacy should be fixed, but isn’t relevant to the issue.
Not every fan group or war clan is meant to be a huge public entity with thousands of members. Sometimes it’s a group of young teens with a small YouTube channel, or roleplaying a war between friends. My point isn’t about that though, my point is that players create groups where the higher ranks or small scale make it easy to pick out the owner’s friends.
There’s no reason there would need to be backwards compatibility issues. Querying friends could simply return an empty set instead of erroring, and groups could be the same. It’d just be like if you logged out, unfriended everyone, and then rejoined- something that experiences already have to support.
This would lead to a terrible user experience, players may become confused about why their friends won’t load and / or become frightened that everyone unfriended them in experiences such as friend checker. This also leads to compatability issues (take my example case, setting your friends / groups to private will exile you from the server without any way to return). There would also be no way for developers to tell the difference, and hence, poor user messaging will need to be used: “You have set your friends to private or have no friends”
I was mainly specifying that you have never been able to bypass the inventory privacy setting in-experience so developers have never needed to make adjustments for the change, so adding inventory privacy was a no-friction change unlike this one.
I don’t think anybody would be confused if they set their friends list to private and then could see it fine when logged into their account but not when logged out or on a different account. Hiding it on the profile doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be able to see your own list normally.
For experiences, allowing them to get info for logged in users after a prompt seems fine.
I was specifically referring to experiences which would need to be backwards compatible, currently experiences can grab any user’s friends without any “permission prompt” (even users which are not in-experience) and many experiences would remain this way (IE: they won’t update). Hence needing some way to be backwards compatible without confusing users, erroring out the entire experience or making many use-cases unobtainable.
Not something I would personally use, but to be honest, I fully support this. It’s the most basic privacy feature that every social platform should have, including Roblox.
If we need people to wanna go to our small groups via our profile and it’s off then ta da you wasted 100 Robux on something no one can join from your profile
