Popular children's gaming platform Roblox has been sued. Two California parents accuse the developers of illegally intercepting and collecting sensitive user data, violating federal law.
In 2024, Roblox reached a milestone by gaining 380 million monthly active users, making it the largest gaming and metaverse platform in the world. The platform offers thousands of games created by users – you can play, but you can also create your own games and try to earn money on them. In 2023, the Roblox platform was visited by 3.96 million Polish internet users. Roblox itself states that it has 97 million daily active users.
According to New User Machine, Roblox, counting all accounts registered to date, has over 8 billion 228 million accounts – more than the number of people in the world. Of course, many of these accounts are inactive. However, it shows the scale of the platform's size.
Roblox (RBLX) is listed on the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange). The market capitalization is approximately $49.85 billion.
It is very popular among children and young people, and at the same time, it has faced harsh criticism for years about access to age-inappropriate content. 46% of daily users of Roblox are under 13. In a 2025 interview with Roblox CEO David Baszucki, it was stated that this percentage was based on a sample of about 40% of the 85 million daily users. This data was cited in the lawsuit.
Roblox has been the subject of numerous class action lawsuits over the years related to content moderation, refunds, underage gambling, and a variety of other potentially dangerous practices. While a few of these cases have been settled, most are still ongoing. This is also likely one of the reasons why Roblox is trying to implement new parental control tools.
The new class action lawsuit seeks to go much further, accusing Roblox of numerous violations:
- Illegally intercepting and tracking user communications and device data via hidden scripts and fingerprinting techniques (e.g. Canvas and audio fingerprinting), even before users log in or provide consent.
- Collecting personal information from children without verifiable parental consent, in violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
- Sharing sensitive user data with third parties such as Google Analytics and Stripe, which constitutes eavesdropping and unauthorized disclosure under federal law.
The lawsuit accuses Roblox of collecting private data such as mouse movements, clicking behavior, phone sensor data, text chat messages, search queries, IP addresses, and more.
“Children's data is an extremely valuable resource that requires special protection. It contains sensitive information, such as personal, health or educational data, which can easily be used in an unethical or harmful way. Children, as people particularly exposed to risk, are not fully aware of the threats associated with sharing their data online. Therefore, it is the responsibility of adults – parents, guardians and institutions – to ensure that the data of the youngest is collected and processed with the utmost care and in accordance with the principles of privacy and security,” says Arkadiusz Kraszewski from Marken Systemy Antywirusowe, the Polish distributor of Bitdefender software.
If the company loses, the damages could cover all Roblox users in the U.S. as of July 1, 2021. The lawsuit seeks statutory damages of $10,000 per person under the ECPA and $1,000 under the SCA. Given the number of people Roblox claims to have been affected, the maximum damages awarded could be in the tens of billions of dollars.
The parents also want Roblox to stop collecting data, delete unlawfully collected data, and implement appropriate parental consent mechanisms. These amounts do not include any punitive damages that the court could also award.
A Roblox spokesperson issued a statement regarding the class action lawsuit. “Roblox puts safety first and strives to provide a safe, civil, and welcoming platform for everyone. We comply with applicable laws and regulations, and cooperate with regulators, authorities, and security organizations in the countries where we operate. We are committed to protecting our youngest users by undergoing regular third-party audits of our policies and practices to confirm that Roblox has security measures in place and is compliant with COPPA. We continually update our policies to enhance user safety, security, and privacy.”
by KWS based on a press release by Bitdefender
