Their argument, essentially, is that an eight-year-old ticked a box that agreed to the terms and conditions, which stated she would have to go through a “secret arbitration process” in any claims brought against Roblox.
“She was a child, she didn’t understand arbitration,” Heine’s mother, Jaimee Seitz, says. “She didn’t understand contracts. She didn’t understand what the little box could mean years later. But now they want a court to treat that click as though an 8-year-old knowingly negotiated away her right to have these issues heard. It’s insulting.”
On top of all the other bullshit, the girl is dead, she’s not the one suing Roblox. Her mom is suing Roblox and signed no terms and conditions.
Terms and conditions stuff already gets thrown out immediately every time, but this one actually just sounds like Roblox admitting to a different crime as an attempt at a defense; It’s illegal to collect online data about children under 13, including accepting terms and conditions.
It’s not necessarily illegal, there are just far stricter conditions on what platforms can do that most platforms don’t want the legal headache and make minimum age 13.
Facebook was trying to make a social app for under-13s at one point, because of course they were.
Tbf I wish everyone under 13 was quarantined away from the rest of the internet bc I don’t wanna interact with them, but the challenge is “find a way to do that that’s airtight against pedophiles and also somehow doesn’t extract your child’s DNA to work.”
inb4 the state will just ban 8yos from roblox instead of addressing the predatory legal system enforced by “terms and conditions”.
Binding arbitration in click wrap agreements between a business and a customer is just nonsense.
I’m honestly surprised they even bother doing it still, every time it just gets the company a round of bad press before immediately getting thrown out like every other time this has been tried
We don’t hear about the cases where it works
I don’t think that’s it, the courts have been very consistent that basically nothing in terms and conditions are enforceable, especially arbitration agreements
yeah but you have to know that and refuse the arbitration. probably a decent chunk of people who don’t even know that the arbitration isn’t a court thing.
Its kind of wild that I have to assume that the worst gaming company isnt Blizzard or like EA but the folks behind Roblox
yeah there’s “ruining vidya games with DLCs that everyone keeps buying anyway” bad and then “child labour suicide camp” bad and society just gleams over the latter because the camp is made of knockoff lego
They’re basically running on child labor and paying them in scrip, a quite uniquely machiavellian scheme in the gaming world.
roblox is pretty insular, they don’t interact with the rest of gaming very much.
iirc it’s literally half of the videogames industry by revenue
