Roblox Lawsuit Alleges Video Game Platform Secretly Tracks Kids’ Online Data

California family’s lawsuit indicates that Roblox has engineered a complex online tracking system of its user base, despite many of those users being under the age of 13.

A class action lawsuit claims that online gaming platform Roblox has developed a complex system to track its users across the internet, amounting to a virtual wiretap on every device that logs onto its platform.

The complaint (PDF) was filed on April 18 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California by Michael Garcia, Salena Garcia, and their minor child, R.G., naming Roblox Corporation as the sole defendant.

Roblox is an online gaming platform launched in 2006, which allows players to explore virtual worlds, create their own games, and interact with others. It features customizable avatars and in-game purchases.

While Roblox is marketed as a family-friendly environment, a series of gaming addiction lawsuits have been filed, alleging that platforms like Roblox, Epic Games and others employ addictive design features and monetization tactics that disproportionately target children, encouraging excessive in-game purchases and prolonged use.

These cases have joined a growing number of additional online gaming addiction lawsuits being pursued against various developers and publishers, including Microsoft, Epic, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Nintendo and others, claiming that they market products that are designed to create addictive properties.

Like the Garcias, these lawsuits claim many video game platforms often illegally monitor children’s online activity. However, the gaming addiction lawsuits also indicate that the companies use algorithms based on behavior learned from tracking users to keep children and adults playing longer, in an attempt to sell players game improvements or “cosmetic” items for small, seemingly digestible amounts.

Garcia’s lawsuit claims that Roblox secretly collects and shares personal data through hidden tracking technologies embedded in its website and apps. According to the complaint, this surveillance begins the moment a user accesses the platform, before logging in or creating an account, and continues across devices and browsers using persistent identifiers and fingerprinting.

The plaintiffs claim that Roblox’s tracking mechanisms include canvas fingerprinting, audio fingerprinting and keystroke logging, which harvest device configurations, IP addresses, mouse movements and other sensitive details. This information is then transmitted in real time to Roblox’s servers and to third parties for marketing and analytics purposes.

The lawsuit argues that these practices violate several federal laws, including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the Stored Communications Act (SCA) and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Under COPPA, platforms are prohibited from collecting personal information from children under 13 without verifiable parental consent.

Despite knowing that nearly half of its daily users are under 13, the plaintiffs say Roblox failed to obtain any meaningful parental consent before collecting and sharing this data. The lawsuit indicates that even parents who provided recovery email addresses for their children’s accounts were not informed about the data collection until after the surveillance had already occurred.

“Plaintiffs had a reasonable expectation that their private communications (and their devices’ intimate details) would not be secretly taped and recorded for profit,” the lawsuit states. “Roblox shattered those expectations by imposing their data collection methods on users in a manner akin to installing a surveillance bug on their personal device.”

The lawsuit seeks class action status for both minor and adult users of the Roblox platform and calls for injunctive relief, statutory and punitive damages, and a declaration that Roblox’s data collection practices are illegal.

Online Addiction Lawsuits

Many of the issues plaguing the online gaming industry are similar to complaints that have been raised against social media platforms.

Lawsuits filed in recent years by the parents of minors allege that platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok and others have knowingly designed their apps to exploit children’s vulnerabilities, leading to excessive use, emotional distress and other harmful effects, without proper safeguards or parental oversight.

Given common questions of fact and law raised in lawsuits filed across the federal court system, all cases involving teen social media addiction were consolidated into a multidistrict litigation (MDL) last year. These cases, which include both personal injury claims and lawsuits filed by school districts, were centralized before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California for coordinated discovery and pretrial proceedings.

To help manage the litigation and gauge how juries are likely to respond to certain evidence and testimony that will be repeated throughout the claims, Judge Rogers has announced plans to conduct a series of bellwether trials. These trials will address both individual student injury cases and claims brought by school districts.

Although the first social media addiction bellwether trial was initially set for October 2025, a recent case management order indicates it will likely be pushed to 2026. However, by May 23, 2025, both parties should have selected a group of cases to proceed to trial. Expert witness discovery and pretrial motions are then scheduled to continue through late 2025, with Daubert hearings scheduled after November 25, 2025, to evaluate expert testimony and establish the sequence for the bellwether trials.