I came across a service called PolicyService. It gathers information from a player’s age, geolocation, and platform to determine if a player can do something. I want to know if using this with a players’s locale to determine an age would be a violation of the TOS. I haven’t written any code for it in case it is against the rules to save time and energy
I did not know where to post this.
If it is to find if they are <13 or 13+ then it should be allowed. If you are finding their exact birthday then it probably isn’t allowed.
Although I don’t understand how you would possibly do this because the LocaleId only give your language (“en-us”) I assume.
PolicyService is allowed I believe. All of its reference is available to the and it’s only getting age ranges, not exact ages so I don’t see why it would be against ToS.
If it isn’t allowed, Roblox has full capabilities to prevent you from accessing it. If you can access it, don’t worry about it.
There are few threads that have covered this subject already – the responses to them indicate that utilizing that to determine if a player is <13 or 13+ is a big no no because it’s considered PII (Personally Identifiable Information).
Even if it’s just as general as older than or younger than 13, I don’t believe it’s advised to utilize PolicyService for this purpose.
If you weren’t allowed to use it, Roblox would simply restrict its usage so it could only be used by CoreScripts
PolicyService was made primarily so games could be compliant with chinese rules. It may take age into account, yes, but it doesn’t directly tell you, so any attempts at using it for that could result in false positives. Why would you need to know this anyway ?
(yes, the Player:GetUnder13 function is RobloxScriptSecurity, so it’s not allowed)
I was thinking of using it as to locate the country.
The TOS requires Devs to folly COPPA. So I was wondering legal wise and TOS wise, was it against the rules. My game uses TextService to filter chat to show to the server. And Roblox is strict on chat. So I wanted the ability to be able to not have to use it 24/7 and allow a bit more words that Roblox would deem inappropriate while blocking words still.
I would assume if they gave you access it would be allowed, or said if certain usage wasn’t allowed on the dev wiki
I haven’t looked enough into policyservice to know the full extent of its power, however from what I’ve heard it’s mostly just a “can this player access (gambling/chance based lootboxes/trading/assorted similar things)” feature.
All games are required to use Roblox’s text filtering for chat – if a word is normally deemed inappropriate by the filter and your game works around that in any capacity, it’d likely result in the game being taking down since it would be bypassing certain parts of the default filter.
If you weren’t allowed to use it, they’d restrict it to Roblox CoreScripts. You can’t detect if they’re under/over 13, but it looks like you can use it to detect account restrictions and modify your game experience for those restrictions.
I get that. But it uses user ID so it can trace users. And I don’t want to fear having people type a lot, then they can’t speak due to being muted. I am working on my own Filter.
Also I don’t know how strict Roblox really is on checking games. There is a certain tool used to obfuscate scripts that has questionable strings. If you know what I am talking about then good.
I’m pretty sure it uses their UserId so it can see their account settings and figure out what to censor, not to trace them.
Anyway,
Roblox is pretty strict when it comes to things like not filtering text it can either cause your account to be warned, banned, or your game deleted. The main reason for this is so that children don’t encounter people swearing in-games or doing anything else inappropriate.
PolicyService is available for use so developers can make their game compatible for certain countries such as China or Germany. This allows us to enabled or disable things in our games that may be legal for one country but illegal for another.
They even give a code sample of how to use it:
If something is against the TOS, Roblox would restrict access to it and make it clear in the Community Rules and Terms of Use.
If you’re going against the ToS, why do you care about the ToS to begin with?
I am not going against the TOS, I just don’t want underaged kids joined an see a curse word because there was a bypass and the text is self filtered. So, even though only certain people can access it, I want to make sure that in case a word is put in and not filtered, kids don’t see it.
Oh, I think I and others misunderstood. It took a couple more reads on my part, but you’re not doing anything wrong. I reiterate that you are fine to use PolicyService to get someone’s 13+ status, so long as the API for it can be run in a script in your game, then it is something Roblox has specifically allowed you to use.
