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Why Doesn't 'Google Kids' Exist?
theodp writes "Slate's Michael Agger wishes there was a website his 6-year-old son could visit on his own to watch amateur Star Wars Lego movies and other stuff he's curious about. 'But I don't leave him alone on YouTube,' he laments, 'because I never know if some strange-ass video will appear in the 'Related Videos' section.' Agger suggests that Google should create Google Kids, a search engine that filters the Web for children. 'Think back to when you were a kid and your parents dropped you off at the library,' explains Agger. 'In the children's section, the only "inappropriate" stuff to be found was Judy Blume's Forever, which someone's older sister had usually already checked out anyway. Similarly, Google Kids would be a sort of children's section of the Web, focused on providing high-quality results based on age.'"
One bad video/image slipping through could cause Google a lot of problems. Think wardrobe malfunction x 1,000,000 Its why many companies shy away from this.
Parents use the Internet as a babysitting tool more often than not these days. Then when they find that little Johnny or Judy finds something inappropriate on the Internet they cry foul about it and say that it shouldn't be on the Internet for their kids to find thus punishing everyone else. Or they run to some filtering program to hopefully block the bad stuff and then the kid finds their way around it and then the parent has a fit about it.
How about actually being a parent? Sitting down with your child and help them use the Internet safely is far better than trying to either force the usage of filtering applications or ranting about why the content is there to begin with.
This puts Google in the position of being mommy and daddy. What I consider "inappropriate" is unlikely to be the same as the next parent; what this suggests, though, is that everyone gets to deal with what Google decides, and frankly... that's not an appropriate role for a third party. That's the parent's job. If you don't have time for guiding your kids, and you can't seem to come up with rules and behaviors, or use a white-list facility competently, then perhaps you shouldn't be spawning anyway, rather than begging for a third party to do your job for you.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Create a different user account for each of your family members, and set individual preferences. You'll want that anyway.
You people disgust me. You go through the trouble of having a kid and yet you want to leave the responsibilty to big corporation. If you can't bother to spend time browsing the web with your kid, don't have one.
did you forget to take your meds?
If he's not old enough to see a lot of the content on youtube, or elsewhere for that matter, then your son shouldn't be on the internet without your supervision anyway. Use the time as bonding time between you and your child. If you are too busy to sit with them while they are on the internet, then have them do something else (play with toys, etc) and only let them use a computer when you are around/have time to be with them. And, even if there were a "Google Kids", how would you keep the kid from accidentally getting out into the "real" internet? You would need a computer/account locked down tighter than an iPod. Moral of the story: the onus of raising your child is on you. Don't try to make Google/the internet/TV/the government raise them for you.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
According to the ALA's Freedom to Read statement, librarians should not be censoring what children read, either. If a child you've dropped off at the library wants to wander into young adult or the regular adult stacks and start paging through books, the librarians should only be stepping in if the book is being mishandled. So while children's content is collected together in the children's area, the child is not prevented from accessing adult materials. You know, because the librarians aren't babysitters and are also not meant to be filters for your children the way you are, being their legal guardian and all.
It surely would be a Nice Thing to make a playground on the Internet for kids, but why should Google bother to do it? Go make it yourself if it's such a good idea. "Oh, I don't have the resources to do that," you say. Well... there you go. Google isn't a charity.
Now, YouTube Kids or something like that, maybe you can see something there. (Think, vetted content from the likes of Nickelodeon and PBS, actually rated as 'G' or 'E' or whatever by a real ratings agency.) It's probably easier to get profitable advertising in videos there as well; kids can't be the best at operating click-through ads.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
'Think back to when you were a kid and your parents dropped you off at the library,' explains Agger. 'In the children's section, the only "inappropriate" stuff to be found was Judy Blume's Forever, which someone's older sister had usually already checked out anyway.
This is the entirety of the issue in two simple sentences.
First is the fact that the library section is managed by humans. It is not collected programatically. It takes human intervention to select tittles for this unique collection. This is something that Google either simply does not do or tends to avoid. Google's selections are handled by infamous algorithms that, while generally effective, are not without error or immune to manipulation. It was Yahoo that, over a decade ago, hired librarians to try to catalog the web.
Secondly, even with human librarians making selections for the library's children's section, mistakes and interpretation come in to play. Is Judy Blume's Forever appropriate? All the controversy over this particular book highlights the indistinct boundaries of determining the "appropriateness" of material. And the fact that the article's author even raises the spectre of controversy over this particular book highlights the difficulty in managing even a small, distinctly controlled environment much less anything as vast and fluid as Internet content.
Sheesh. All that's being asked here is the equivalent of a kids playground in that big bad unsupervised city you speak of. I think a Google search engine that filters based on vetted content for kids (i.e. a whitelist) with user-preferences is a GREAT idea. It gives them the freedom and experience of learning about how to use the internet without having to deal with traumatic experiences like random goatse-like websites. And who cares if it doesn't work 100% of the time? If it filters out 99.9% of the stuff, then I'd consider it useful.
By your logic, I shouldn't even be letting my kids outside to play because it's not "safe". Or if I do, I should be a helicopter parent, constantly hovering over them to make sure they're 100% safe 100% of the time? Even playgrounds aren't 100% safe either...they're may be sexual predators lurking in the bushes after all. Does that mean I shouldn't take my kids to them? No. It means I still watch my kids if they're in a playground, but I don't have to watch them as closely as if they're running around in a ghetto.