New Roblox Changes

In just a few weeks, in order to play any game on Roblox that is rated higher than "minimal" maturity level, you are required to surrender your government identification to Roblox's partner, Persona. Persona is a company backed by Peter Thiel, the CEO of Palantir. This means that Palantir, the private company behind a significant amount of mass surveillance of United States citizens, will have everything on your government ID. Your date of birth, sex, height, weight, eye color, hair color, full government name, home address, and a picture of you will be logged into their data centers and be used to track you. Roblox is fundamentally feeding Persona and Palantir vital information on tens of millions of children and adults.

We're headed down a dark path if this continues. The government isn't your friend. These private companies aren't your friend. They see profit in you. They see a way of controlling you to do what they want.

If you don't think privacy is important, just hear this: what isn't illegal today very well could be illegal tomorrow. As DeFlock puts it, "As history has shown, when governments or third parties gain unchecked surveillance powers, they're eventually used against people who weren't doing anything wrong—until someone decided they were."

Peq42, an online blogger from Brazil shares some more information here: "Do not give any of them any private information. Avoid those companies as much as possible. The more you let them learn about you, the more the whole world, not just the U.S., becomes a surveillance state." They also state, "NEVER give companies a picture of your face, ID, location or anything similar. Always use fake ones. Lie about that data."

There is something we can do about this, though. Boycott these companies. Roblox, Discord, OpenAI, LinkedIn, VRChat, DoorDash, and Etsy to name a few all use Persona to identify and store the information of their customers. There are other applications that are better to use in many ways than just not tracking their customers. Some bring brand new features that the "on-brand" application would never think to do.