Thailand’s Digital Economy and Society Ministry has proposed linking the country’s National Digital ID, or NDID, and know-your-customer checks to Roblox user accounts as part of child-safety talks with the gaming platform.
Digital Economy and Society Minister Chaichanok Chidchob raised the proposal in an online meeting with Edward Palmieri, Roblox’s senior director of public policy, along with officials from the Electronic Transactions Development Agency and the Digital Economy Promotion Agency. NDID is Thailand’s national identity and KYC framework, already used to verify users for banking and government services, though a major Thai bank has recently had to pause one of its own NDID-linked mobile authentication channels. Linking NDID to a gaming account would let Roblox confirm a player’s real identity and age against that same government-backed system rather than relying on self-reported birthdates. The ministry proposed a joint working group to study a user-verification system for Thailand as a first step.
The talks also covered Roblox’s existing safety tools, including facial age estimation and chat moderation that flags inappropriate messages, along with plans to adopt the International Age Rating Coalition’s rating system in 2027. Roblox presented its Family Zone, an in-platform space intended to help parents understand the game’s safety controls. For a later phase, the minister proposed studying pre-publication content scanning and analysis of user history logs to flag risky behavior, though he said any such tools would need review for their effect on user privacy.
The accelerated timeline follows public concern in Thailand over youth violence after a school shooting, though the minister said police found no evidence tying the attacker to dark-web access or violent material despite some media reports. The ministry has separately asked gaming platforms to alert authorities when accounts show unusually intense behavior involving firearms, and has held related child-safety talks with Apple and Meta.
An NDID link would extend Thailand’s identity infrastructure well beyond its original banking use. Roblox, meanwhile, has been rolling out age-estimation checks tied to feature access more broadly, having recently extended selfie-based age estimation to chat access worldwide.
