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Roblox has been criticized for its child safety issues, but argues it’s investing in minor protection. (Photo Illustration by Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
In 2023, a mother called the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center with concerns about her 10-year-old daughter, who she said had been groomed by a man on the popular games platform Roblox.
According to a recently-unsealed search warrant reviewed by Forbes, the man had fostered a relationship with the girl on the site, then turned the conversation sexual, asking for pictures of the minor that she provided over text message. The mother said the man had later hacked into the girl’s online schooling accounts, locking her out of all of her classes because she only attended virtually. Her mother told investigators she feared the man may have obtained administrator level access to those virtual schools. She told FBI agents her daughter had tried to take her own life more than once. The daughter later told the FBI that her other friends on Roblox had been stalked and harassed by the same man. He has not been charged with a crime. The Department of Justice declined to comment on the case.
Roblox has been under fire in recent months over allegations it has failed to protect its minor users. In April, Florida’s Attorney General James Uthmeier said he was issuing a subpoena to Roblox “to uncover how this platform is marketing to children and to see what policies they are implementing—if any—to avoid interactions with predators.” Uthmeier said in an online statement there had been “concerning reports about children being exposed to graphic or harmful material on the gaming platform, as well as predatory adults being able to message minors on the app freely.”
Roblox said it was continuing to improve its safety procedures and systems. “As a policy, we cannot comment on pending litigation. With that being said, Roblox is deeply committed to the safety and well-being of our community and helping protect children is a top priority,” spokesperson Kadia Koroma said.
“We invest significant resources in advanced technology like robust filters as well as maintaining human moderation teams, to help detect and address inappropriate content and behavior and do not allow user-to-user image sharing on our platform.” She said Roblox constantly monitors the platform for inappropriate content and regularly works with law enforcement to protect children.
The mounting criticism hasn’t stopped Roblox’s growth. In its first quarter results released earlier this year, Roblox reported that average daily active users hit 97.8 million, up 26% year-over-year.
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THE BIG STORY:
OpenAI Launches Defense And Government Business
OpenAI is starting to work with the Pentagon. (Photo by Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images)
Getty Images
OpenAI has announced OpenAI for Government, a new initiative to provide its AI tools to all manner of government agencies, including the military.
The new entity has secured a contract worth up to $200 million with the Department of Defense’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office to “help the Defense Department identify and prototype how frontier AI can transform its administrative operations, from improving how service members and their families get healthcare, to streamlining how they look at program and acquisition data, to supporting proactive cyber defense,” the company wrote in a post announcing the deal.
Stories You Have To Read Today
The Minnesota man accused of killing a lawmaker, her husband and attempting to murder another local politician and their allegedly used data broker sites to locate his victims, according to court documents. Police found a notebook listing 11 registered data brokers, alongside the names and addresses of other lawmakers, investigators said.
Meta AI users had no idea their prompts would be made public when they asked the chatbot things like for help on school tests and “anthropomorphic animal characters wearing very little clothing.” But according to numerous user complaints, their queries were open on the web for anyone to view. While Meta says that users are given fair warning about prompts being public, and it’s easy to make them private, many users appear to have misunderstood that their searches would be available on the “Discover” feed on the Meta AI app and website. One expert said it was a “huge user experience and security problem.”
The Washington Post is investigating a cyberattack on a small number of unnamed reporters, whose emails appear to have been hacked. The paper forced a reset of login credentials for all staff late last week, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Food distribution giant United Natural Foods said it’s recovering from a hack that disrupted operations, leading to some food shortages across American grocery stores. Electronic ordering systems are now coming back online, two weeks after the initial breach, TechCrunch reports.
Winner of the Week
Horizon.ai, which offers tools to cybersecurity teams to help them find vulnerabilities in their networks, announced a $100 million Series D funding round led by venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates. “We’ve proven that using AI to hack companies isn’t science fiction—it’s real, and it’s delivering measurable results at scale,” said Horizon.ai CEO and cofounder Snehal Antani. The company’s customers use its AI not as an offensive weapon but as a virtual “pentester,” probing companies’ IT systems to show them where real hackers could get in.
Loser of the Week
The longest-standing dark web drug market, Archetyp Market, is no more. A 30-year-old alleged administrator was arrested in Barcelona, Spain, while the site’s infrastructure was taken down, as part of a European-led police operation. Archetyp had more than 600,000 users worldwide, with as much as $250 million in sales for narcotics, including fentanyl.
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