Not everyone is comfortable with letting strangers view their online status, friends, following, favorites, biography (AKA “about me”), communities, creations, inventory, and all the badges that they have ever obtained.
There are too many ways bad actors can misuse this information to target victims. For the sake of this feature request, here are a few key examples involving a stalker:
Join the victim’s friends in hopes of being placed in the same server as the victim.
Reach out to friends to gather more personal information.
See and track the victim’s social connections.
Users should be able to make their profile private so that non-friends (or whatever option the user chose) cannot view their profile, but they will be able to still see crucial information like their avatar thumbnail, username, display name, report and friend request button (if they chose to allow requests).
Other social media platforms offer similar feature:
X (formerly Twitter)
Using “Protect your posts” feature you can restrict your posts to only approved followers, and hide your replies:
There really needs to be more privacy settings. But instead of just hiding everything, why not provide more control?
I think there should be individual visibility settings for your avatar thumbnail, your “About” section, your Creations, your friends, your followings, your followers, your Communities, your favorites, and your Roblox Badges. You could also keep the “private profile” toggle to quickly hide everything for convenience.
User Badges are already tied to Inventory visibility (this change was made a few months ago). Ideally, user outfits should as well, but there’s a separate feature request for that.
This would most likely break a lot of in-game functionalities and would allow predators to hide alot of information that could be used against them. Not sure if this would help roblox or no.
Presonally i think any privacy option is good, but having listed those things above, i’m not sure roblox would do it
Can you list some? One I can think of from top of my head that wouldn’t invade privacy would be the badge check, which I think it’s fair to let games check whether a badge was given to the player via BadgeService:UserHasBadgeAsync as long as the badge belongs to the game.
That’s fair counterpoint, although moderators will still be able to see the full profile information regardless of privacy settings so that wouldn’t impact their investigation efforts.
You can entirely hide your account existence by de-activating it, which makes it impossible to identify whether the account was terminated, deleted, or de-activated, in addition to the fact that you can’t see the profile at all. I think it’s unlikely that they would reject the feature for that reason alone.
“That’s fair counterpoint, although moderators will still be able to see the full profile information regardless of privacy settings so that wouldn’t impact their investigation efforts.” Yeah roblox does NOT care about predators unless a large number of people call them out, all this does is make it harder to find out if roblox actually did ban them or they just private their account
There are quite a lot of games that count the user’s place visits, friends list, amount of followers, groups the user is in, etc.
Alot of these games’ functionality would break and developers would have to find workarounds to either show this information somehow
predators already do this using the account deactivation feature… and presumably the ability to only set their profile to private would reasonably just show a “this user’s profile is private” message like any other platform with such a feature instead of showing a 404 page like a banned/terminated user would.
