Slashdot Mirror
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.
The liability. As soon as someone creatively slides adult themed content into the kid-friendly search results, someone will go ape shit. Not to mention the "what you feel is right for my kid isn't what I feel is right for my kid" crowds. Parenting is subjective, and everyone has different opinions of what it entails.
Really? It's hard to get to see even a naked boobie there. Since he cites "Forever", I guess that's his prime concern. I'm pretty sure there is violence on youtube. I'd be way more concerned about that.
Doesn't youtube also have age verification? Set up an account for the kid and make clear it's a kid.
But of course, actually spending time with your kid and not letting it sit in front of the computer unsupervised is the only thing that would be correct.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Create a different user account for each of your family members, and set individual preferences. You'll want that anyway.
Make it yourself. Seriously, companies are under no obligation to "Think of the children!". "...was a website his 6-year-old son could visit on his own..." Actually why the hell are you letting your 6 year old surf on their own 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?
What's the business model being proposed? I imagine such a filtered view of the Internet creates only liability when it fails, not any increase of profit when it succeeds.
Google kids? Why don't you have a seat over there.
Google Kids already exists - it's called "spending time with your kids on the computer". It works perfectly, they'll never see anything you don't want them to and as a bonus you'll develop that precious parent-child relationship.
However, it sounds like what the author really wants is a product that would be named "Google Parent", where you plonk them down in front of a computer at age three and then fifteen years later an adult magically emerges. Sadly, that's still in beta.
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
http://kids.us/ was a manual attempt in that direction. It seems mostly dormant.
There are so many things which can go wrong with such a service, especially if you try to automate it: You might pick up something erroneously. Domain ownership or content changes suddenly. An inappropriate advertisement is included. Google would have to be right every time, or someone will spot the mistake and unleash the hellhounds. Parents are rather nervous about what their children might potentially see on the Internet, even if it is a restricted subset.
I'm also sure that many parents think that Star Wars isn't suitable for six-year-olds.
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.
That is all. That and as stated above, do not use the internet as a baby sitter.
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.
It isn't up to google to babysit your kids.
Crank up SafeSearch, then use OpenDNS for further filtering, and then actually supervise your kid while they use the internet and inform them of why certain things are bad/scary instead of leaving them alone to deal with it.
Don't wish for a bubble and then wonder why after leaving the bubble they just click on everything.
Plus, you're just going to have the usual issue that one community / city / state's idea of what is acceptable for kids and what is not is going to be drastically different than another community / city / state.
"We need to get over this notion, that, for Apple to win... Microsoft must lose." - Steve Jobs, 1997
Two problems with that:
#1 Age appropriate is pretty much impossible to automate. Every entry would have to be human-reviewed, and that's expensive.
#2 What you consider age-appropriate, someone else may note, and vice-versa. It's not objective, it's subjective.
Not the first time this has been proposed. I know things like this have been talked about in Google, and proposed by bloggers before.
The first time I saw this proposed was here at Slashdot, circa 1999/2000. A Cnet article that proposed exactly the same thing, I believe.
I would be hard pressed to produce the article. The search function here has improved, but it's still not especially grand for finding anything old and useful.
Anyway, my guess as why it hasn't happened would be that Google is ad supported and it's difficult to get children to buy things on their own.
I don't actually know. Please feel free to call me an idiot, but aren't there already sites that do this outside the scope and depth of Google?
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Because it's not Google's job. In case you didn't know Youtube and Daily Motion both have family filters, perhaps you should look into using them. I believe it is the parents job to monitor what their kids are exposed to.
Chris Sheppard
Why no special child-censored google? For the same reason the child-censoring market in general is so spotty: It's a fool's game.
Why? Because it's all a game of outrage. You'll never come out with a good reputation in a game of outrage, outside of a tiny community of people who rigorously train themselves to think identically.
Let's take the idea as a simple problem - filtering out the big english dirty words, then allowing a voting and challenge system to establish anything else as kid-unsafe.
The first thing you'll find is that many, many of the people interested in voting in such a system will be intentionally playing in bad 'faith'. They'll go after pet subjects, vote everything as inappropriate, and so on.
So, you add a meta-moderation system, and some safe experts to establish better trends. But then the outrage comes in - outrage that will inevitably consume a huge portion of your audience in several directions. Outrage that their kids aren't seeing the world how they want.
A sparse blacklist can occasionally make sense with minimal outrage, like with YouTube's setup, but start trying to make a completely kid-safe youtube, and you'll find yourself to blame for everything an irrational parent would care to imagine against you.
Ryan Fenton
Thank you for saying this.
This sig is not the Zahir. Lucky for you.
oh.. wait ..
Their filters are not foolproof, which is impossible, but you can specify by category which things (websites) you don't want accessible on your home network.
There are other products for this purpose such as Blue Coat K9 and Net Nanny.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I agree with the original poster that Google should offer a Kid search engine or a kid's version of YouTube. That would be awesome and I am very sure a lot of schools would love this concept as well. That said, there are plenty solutions available that can be implemented on the client side. I have absolutely no stake in any of the following companies but I am a father of three and love what they offer. My kids love Zoodles which is pretty much a collection of age appropriate content for kids of all ages. You can find a lot more in the educational arena, like Nick Boost or PBS Kids. Just pick your children's favorite TV channel and chances are they have a lot of online content for your child to play with. Getting age appropriate content is very easy. Even on the search engine side of things we have kid safe offerings. There is Kid Rex and plenty other Google based search engines. Last but not least you should make sure your child can only access child appropriate URLs. For that you can choose any of the web browsers and built-in OS mechanisms to restrict web access. My favorite child browsers are KidZui and the now defunct Kid's Browser.
The World isn't for children and the internet is part of that world. This is a fundamental thing.
Just as you wouldn't let a child run around un-supervised in a city, you don't let them run around free on the internet. Suburbs were supposed to be a child safe environment, but ultimately they aren't either (I would argue they are about the same as cities, but thats getting off topic).
Some web sites are for kids, but to allow them on the internet they should be supervised.
The internet is not the same as TV where there is much greater control of what is coming in. The internet is all about interacting, while TV is about consuming.
There are services that promise to make the internet "safer" but I doubt they work well. I wouldn't trust them.
Give me a freaking break, would you? Yes, my parents would drop me off at the library, but the librarians never stopped us from going into the 'adult' section. Why? Because that's the job of the parent! Not a librarian, not a teacher, and certainly not a corporation. Raise your children and spend time with them or don't have them at all.
'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.
And what about plain parental frustration that they can't turn their back on their kids because using Google or Bing can be like playing Minesweeper with porn, violence and /b/ under every bad tile?
The problem is that it's not really possible to say that stumbling upon it is the exception in many cases. If it were, filtering would be so simple that it'd be built into the browser.
http://kids.yahoo.com/ Be sure to still watch em. The internet can go from kids to adult in about two seconds.
Being 12 year old, I find this entire discussion incredibly discriminating. It's bad enough that I'm subjected to taxation without representation, but now mandatory censorship?
I'd like to remind you adults out there that the goatex guy and goatex posters are "adults", as are most child pornographers. Maybe it's better to perform censorship on the production end by licensing and regulating the ownership of cameras.
Billy Bob wants his son to get an early grasp on the difference between an AK-47 and a M-16 while a parent from Amsterdam might consider instructions on how to grow weed very insightful.
At the same time Fatimah hopes to teach her girl on how to become a martyr, or even worse, Gertrud and Wilhelm want their kids to be comfortable with FKK (Freikörperkultur).
You get my drift.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Your kid can watch mayhem and murder and war on TV 24x7, but Gawd forbid he should via the intertubings see a human or vulva or penis, or one sliding into the other . Better put a chastity belt on your little sprat, lest he uncover the horrible vileness of procreative plumbing lurking betwixt his legs.
Why should it be Google to do this?
Of course it's parents' job to supervise and make decisions for their kids, but they do delegate that to people they trust. But I'm back to: why Google?
My idea of what's appropriate for kids is very different from John Boehner's, which is different from that of Sheik Sadeq Abdallah bin Al-Majed, who would differ from the standards of that nice hippie commune on the other side of town. Google is not in a position to accommodate all of them (and the many other standards); no one would be happy with the results.
If a group of like-minded people want to idetify a subset of the internet that they feel is appropriate for children of a particular age, they should make that happen themselves. Many of them are. Don't just wish for some government or some authority-by-default (like Google) to do it for you, free of charge. D.I.Y.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
The idea of an Internet-wide search engine and a walled garden are opposing concepts. They could be made to work together, but never very well, and the costs of doing so, the limitation of thought and ideas, would outweigh the benefits (none of which I can see).
BRING BACK AOL!!!!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The important aspect about the library is that it is a walled garden. Anything that comes into a library is catalogues and sorted into sections. There is a specific, generally accepted criteria that defines what is children's literature. Anything that is not categorized does not get in. This classification process does not exist on the internet; nor should it. The contents of the internet is too dynamic to be able to keep such a classification accurate or up to date.
The other issue is that children do not just use the kid lit area. They use reference, history, crafts, etc. In fact they can go all over the library.
Another hit to the comparison is that there is no erotica section in most libraries though it defiantly exists on the internet.
The bottom line is that a library is a pretty 'safe' place for a child to wander around unsupervised and look at books; the internet is not;and never will be.
He considers the novel "Forever" to be harmful to children. It is a book aimed at kids to help them understand their sexuality and feelings as they grow into their teens and become young adults.
It is probably not a book a 6 year old would be intrested in but won't harm them as a 6 year old who IS interested in it and can understand the subject matter, is EXACTLY the audience. Young people curious about the emotions happening to them. Who is to say a child of few more years might not be interested? Or a young child observing older siblings?
Where do you start to censor and where do you stop? Ultimately that is partly up to a parent. Nobody else can unless you want someone else to decide what you can watch.
Because for every parent who thinks Forever is bad for kids, there is someone who thinks Anne Frank should be banned or countless other "controversial" books that might give people the "wrong" idea.
Be careful wishing for a censored net, you just might get it.
Anyway, the censored net already exists, you can buy it. They block access to youtube, so you are safe from harmfull influences. Why should google fund a web project that will block itself? Buy some Halal or Christian ISP service. All the filters you could possibly want to make sure you kid never sees anything that might cause it to ask questions.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The area where Google becomes very, very incompetent is whenever you cannot automatize something completely. For example they have legal action pending against them in Switzerland for not reliably blurring out faces in streetview. Why they not just use something like the amazon mechanical turk, or give a small amount of money to anybody that reports a non-blurred face first, is beyond me.
This, however, is exactly the problem with Google: Their accuracy overall is atrocious. Normal search is often cluttered with irrelevant results to the point of being unusable. And lately they have started to search for things I did not tell them to search for, as if they knew better. For most things these days I have to use quotes and pluses. Just think about how much non-kid stuff were left if they did a kid search engine using these same shoddy mechanisms.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It sounds like the author's concerns are pretty similar to those the Chinese government has for all its citizens. Maybe an English language Baidu would be a good place to start.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
>'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,
What a bunch of hooey.
Judy Blume was never in the Children's Section. She was in the Young Adults section. YA
Also... YA books?
Pfft.... Amateurs. Why bother when you can cruise on over to the Adult section and read the "real books"? I had my own library card at 7, the minimum age. I could check out whatever I wanted. When I hit the tween and teen years, I skipped right over the YA section.
Adult authors warp a young mind? Yes, yes they did. So did Isaac Asimov and a bunch of SF authors among others (I was hot for the "Golden Age" SF stuff at the time), but I certainly found my way over to the books my mom would disapprove of. It's not like there's a Chinese wall between the kid section and the adult sections. It's not like a librarian is going to stop you from checking out the other side. Indeed, all the good SF was on the adult side, and my librarian (RIP, Mrs. Griffith, you are fondly remembered) is the one that turned me on to that genre. My first reference to oral sex in literature was in Poul Andersen's book "Gateway." Larry Niven's permissive sex in the Ringworld saga gave me a new vocabulary word for interspecies sex.
As for "inappropriate," try Virginia Andrews. The incest sex scenes in "Flowers in the Attic" were ... interesting to a 13 year old boy.
Ain't no censorship in a library, parents. If your kid is quiet, he/she can go anywhere and read any ol' thing. It's encouraged.
--
BMO
It's a free browser for kids with only white-listed content. I have it on my 7 year old daughter's netbook and she loves it. You have the option of creating a parent's account and getting a weekly report of your kids' internet activity. Also when you set it up, you can choose gender and an age-range which changes what is shown on the home page. There's also an option to run it full screen, require a password to exit and to start the program when Windows starts so that your kid can only access what's in the browser.
Did you know that eating dirt is good for kids? Did you know that years of scrubbing hospitals of every bacteria has made them an incubator for resistent staph? It is not the occasional exposure to internet filth that alarms me as a parent. What would bother me would be my kid focusing on it and consuming it in unhealthy quantities. Building a filter to stop all exposure is lazy parenting. What you want is a relationship such that your kids, when they happen on something, talk to you about it rather than hiding it (also called "teaching to the moment"). Our society is constantly assuming that harms from overexposure demonstrate or indicate that zero exposure should be the norm.
Access to porn correlates with lower rates of sexual violence. And this study at a Taiwanese hospital turned up strong evidence that gamma rays (from radioactive rebar inadvertently used in the concrete walls of the hospital) reduced the level of cancer dramatically. http://stan-heretic.blogspot.com/2010/05/gamma-radiation-protects-against-cancer.html "A mom's job is to make sure the kids don't get hurt, the dad's job is to make sure they don't get killed." ETC.
Gently reply
Um, I think what I did was pretty quickly wander out of the kids section, because the books in that area were boring. If a kid wants to read Peter Benchley stories about sharks or eels, they will. (Er, at least that was my thing at the time. Person next to me was into knights and dragons, also not in kids section.)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Fuck you.
I wouldn't. That would just give circletimessquare more kids.
Why no Google Kids? Because kids don't have any money to spend on advertised products?
As others have pointed out, Google is not a charity. Google Kids would be a lot more expensive to run than Google search (because it would need human monitoring) and they'd want money.
That means that, if they ran Google Kids, they'd want to sell things to your kids (or get your kids to pester you to buy things). Don't you get enough of that from TV?
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Because Google is not interested in human filtering tasks, they want everything automated by computer. Since there's no way to automatically filter content without AI you're stuck.
Besides that, who decides which content is acceptable and what isn't? It just isn't going to happen. Now Yahoo or some other "portal" type would be happy to do that.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
families have the balance of power here, as they should, since without them, there is no future for the country
The different parts of your body have different purposes: some (the genitals) produce kids; others (the brain) produce thoughts. Likewise, the different parts of a society have different purposes: some produce kids; others produce thoughts. Humankind has the capacity for language to allow these thoughts to be communicated to the kids. This goes along with ciggieposeur's reply: Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, the fathers of the infinitesimal calculus, were in the thoughts camp rather than the kids camp.
The commercial market for net censorship is tiny. Most of the people making noise about this want the net censored for other people, not themselves. You can't sell a commercial product on that basis.
There's NetNanny, which is generally considered to be mediocre at its job, but does enough to make some parents happy. Smart kids can usually bypass it. The next step up is a Christian ISP, where filtering takes place at the ISP end. There are a few of those, but they're really tiny.
Interestingly, there is a market in "Kosher mobile phones". They're basic voice-only phones preloaded with a religious-artwork theme, sold to the ultra-Orthodox market. A similar product is offered for the comparable branches of Islam.
Sheltering kids from reality has always seemed stupid to me. It builds up a false image of the world in their eyes, just so we can idealize children as innocent. Children are what they are: selfish, thoughtless, loving, needy, playful, energetic, manipulative, and stupid, as a rule. You can replace "stupid" with "ignorant" and then with "innocent", but I find it a conceit to do so, and a harmful one. Don't add to children's ignorance just because you feel uncomfortable describing people's sexual practices and because it's more convenient to idealize their ignorance into innocence. Let them know how the world is and works, so they might navigate through their lives more easily than you did.
Note: I have no kids. If I did, my opinion might well change drastically.
Stop Censorship. Censorship doesn't have shades of gray ... it's black and white. There is either free speech or there isn't. If there is free speech, you don't censor anyone, regardless of age. If there is just ONE content in the world that is banned to even a SINGLE person, then there isn't freedom of speech.
Treating kids like that is awful.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Tossing out all the "be a parent" bullshit posted here since parents have to do stuff like go earn a living sometimes, the correct answer is also in some other posts. Doing this correctly requires a lot more manual intervention then "normal" Google does. You can't automate this without mistakes happening (and that's even if you discount pranksters trying to sneak adult stuff into it deliberately), and the cost of a mistake is a lot higher then it is with the safe search option.
That means they need a staff manually rating stuff. It means checking back on stuff already rated periodically. It means a lot more $$$ then normally spent on a subset of search results. I highly doubt that Google can make that back off special advertising in that section, and I also doubt many people are willing to pay for it.
Something like this would work better if websites were rated and you could set controls in the browser. That was tried once but wasn't widely supported and ICRA (the rating system bundled with IE) appears to have shut down: http://www.icra.org/
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Doesn't youtube also have age verification?
Yes, and it uses age verification to keep children under 13 from signing up. US firms are not allowed to take personally identifying information from a child under 13, not even an e-mail address for password recovery and account deduplication, unless the parent gives permission and can prove his or her identity.
What would really be nice is some kind of (SlashDot) moderation for YouTube comments.
I'm a pretty thick skinned guy, but its far too easy to wallow around in youtube comments and get a distorted view of the world. I'm all for free speech, but the level of racism (whether earnest or trolling) , eventually is wearing. The obvious solution is not to read, but its like a car accident on the road, sometimes I look when I shouldn't! I try my best not to read comments now, and have installed YouTube comment Snob.
Not perfect but helps reduce the concentration of hate that appears in the comments. Also if someone does have a different world view to me, then I still get a chance to read it if they take time to write proper sentences.
Provided you're on an operating system that supports user accounts, which to my understanding means a PC. Do Apple's iPad and the various Android tablets support user accounts yet?
Is this a sincere question or troll baiting? There's no way I would subscribe to a "kids" version of Google. Why don't you have yahoo feed your children, and Sony Corporation take your children to the doctor. I don't have kids and even I know that this is just another example of why children are turning out the way they are. It's so called parents like you that want the television to play the part of babysitter and corporate America to educate them and integrate them into society like a machine.. We are headed to an autocratic society where one day machines will wipe our behinds because of lazy, and spastic people.
I wouldnt leave it up to $_megacorp to decide what is best for my kid unless I vetted their content first. Stuff from websites like NickJR, CatroonNetwork, PBS, Disney and the like all offer kids content that i find appropriate for my 5 year old niece, and its stuff that she is interested in.
If you have any sort of programming knowledge there are a few resources on the web that detail writing simple web crawlers in $lang_du_jeur. Create your own solution that grabs content from sites you approve of and organizes them on an intuitive and kid-friendly web page. Personally, I find this to be a bit too much work, because there are simpler methods to get content for kids
I set up a special firefox install for my niece using Firefox Portable, a carefully configured whitelist add-on, and of course AdBlock Plus I set up bookmarks that link to the flash-game pages of her favorite sites and put them in their own toolbar. This last one is a bit iffy, but i bookmarked youtube searches for her favorite music artists like "hannah montana lyrics" I havent done any research yet, but i also wanna look into creating an image overlay for the youtube video so it'll play audio but she wont see video. Something like Stylish or a Greasemonkey userscript should accomplish that with ease. The setup is easy for her to use. She only has the occasional problem when a site changes its layout and she cant figure out how to start a game.
Performing the same biological function as billions of humans before you doesn't give you any particular insight. I'm tired of this "I'm a saint and I'm a genius, because I squirted a kid out of my crotch" bullshit.
It's not Google's mission statement to be a nanny for your children.
Try being a parent, being involved with your children instead of babysitting them with the internet and television.
It would be nice to be able to whitelist something like "safesearch.google.com", where safesearch is always selected by default. And safesearch.youtube.com, of course. Not that it would block everything objectionable for kids, but it would help. Better than having to configure safesearch on every machine in a school, for instance...
Call it unvirtual reality donkey kong! That would keep them out of trouble for 12 hours a day!
http://blindekuh.de/
bickerdyke
Why does it have to be Google and why does Google have to do this?
Google is a business. They may have considered this but couldn't come up with a viable business case.
Why doesn't someone else do this? it's not like Google is the only search company.
Hello, McFly?!
Google makes their money by selling information about their users to advertisers.
Do you really want your kid being googlestalked?
Go look at the Disney websites, they already stalk the crap out of your kids. It is icky and it is just a walled garden.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Well I must thank you for solving the problem. A great statue will surely be erected in you honor.
Parents should be pre-screening everything their kids see. Including: all tv shows (just incase someone hacks tv station and shows porn again), all Internet usage (incase Anonymous posts porn videos in the middle if childrens videos on YouTube again), all songs on the radio (for obvious reasons). Now, I realize that single mothers and other busy parents aren't going to have time to do this so we all know good parents shouldn't let their kids watch tv, listen to the radio, or go on the Internet. I mean lets start being parents around here right?
. And what about these idiot parents that are working 60 hrs a week and cant keep up with their childs use of new technology? What's facebook? Lulz!!! Bad parents!!!!
You know what? A GOOD parent would go to school with their kids and make sure they aren't using any computers there either....
Obviously I could go on, and get onto the culture our kids live in today, but i think you get the point.
Most libraries have "romance novels", Lovecraft novels, and Steven King novels.
That, and in the religion section, they have the Christian porn commonly called the Song of Solomon.
Think across generations. You were a child, and those children will be adults. For each child there is an adult in the future, and for each adult there was a child in the past.
You're subsidizing yourself really. As a child, you essentially took out a loan. You were given special help, and as a result you owe a debt. It's understandable that you wouldn't enjoy paying back your debt to society, but that's selfish. As others paid for you, so must you pay for others.
A Google infrastructure free of violence, bad language, porn, politics, religion, science, art, contemporary music and any other content any other type of person might be offended by.
I'm all for it, as long as I get to decide what is and isn't inappropriate for my kids.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I see a lot of comments that contain a lot of words articulating ideological beliefs; but I don't see people relaying realism.
Yes, parents should bond with their children more. Yes, parents should browse the internet with their children. Yes, kids live in a world where there's a lot of bad things going on and kids may encounter these bad things off the internet. Unfortunately, these words are not accurate to reality. Regardless of how Slashdot posters raise their children, if those advising even have children, the reality is that kids are continually conducting research online, playing kids games online and there's no reason why, if the technology exists, a safe harbour for kids can't exist online.
Has anyone used Microsoft Family & Safety? It works fantastic. You can blacklist * on the internet and only allow specific sites, customizing their favourites. As kids age though, they want more than crayola and build-a-bear; fortunately, Microsoft has an approved child-friendly list available. You can safely, with confidence, plop a child down in front of the computer and let them click to their hearts content and not fear they'll see anything they shouldn't.
The downside of this is, that kids can't google search for these sites as google is not 'child-friendly' and is on the block list, as you can search for nice sounding things and have the worst results imaginable. Having a kids.google.com would be a great tool, not just for allowing a child to learn how to browse the internet unattended but for a parent to safely search with their child beside them.
You wouldn't let your 6 year old wander the street, why let them wander the internet?
If you read the news more often, you would know that the first half of that sentence occurs fairly often, which entirely informs the second half of your comment.
Yahoo has the formerly named Yahooligans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahooligans
I use kidzui for my daughter sometimes.
having fun. It's called playing. Including in this activity are: climbing trees, playing in the park, kicking a ball around, swinging on the monkey bars, collecting enough deposit bottles to redeem for sweets, pretending to be pirates (ninjas, robots, turtles, jedi - you know the drill) playing with pets, feeding the ducks, looking at real things in the real world.
Having a life...
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
Last I checked (2 years ago) there were already tons of products out there that already do this. Personally I let my son on the net with a firefox extension called KidZui, all pre-approved content and with enough freedom to browse so he feels in charge. Kids need freedom to grow, you can't be watching their every move all day. Unless you want to stifle all your kids development and personality. Set boundaries and guidelines and stick to them, then let them explore.
That is a fucking awful idea. Go research the MPAA and ESRB and other "voluntary ratings systems" and how they inform and impact the final resulting content and product. Content and products that are consumed by those who do not need things censored or controlled for them and are not children, but are none-the-less impacted by these "voluntary" and usually completely corrupt ratings organizations.
Choose your safety mode
Use YouTube's Safety Mode if you don't want to see videos that contain potentially objectionable material on YouTube.
While it's not 100 percent accurate, we use community flagging and other content signals to determine and filter out inappropriate content.
"'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."
And when you were dropped off at the library how long did you stay in the children's section? That's when they had one. Stop dropping the job of parenting on the rest of us. You want to micro-manage your kids then stay with them 24/7 and don't complain about it since you chose to have them. Otherwise just guide them as they learn about these things that you're not ready for.
"Parents" disgust me whenever they feel they can have children yet don't feel like taking on 100% of that responsibility. Especially when a "parent" wants to look to put yet another form of censorship or filtering on the Internet in place, to replace responsible parenting.
I'm starting to believe that neutering shouldn't stop at animals. Why the hell not? We're already facing overpopulation on the planet anyway. Call it my own form of "filtering" irresponsibility, ignorance, and stupidity from the rest of us still ripe with common sense. Perhaps a temporary form of chemical sterilization until an adult can grow up and learn to accept responsibility instead of asking everyone else to do it for them.
Hey Gents.
Director of technology in a big international school here. Several points need-a-clarification.
#1: so, so many parents are so, so different. We once held one of those "parent internet safety" workshops. We asked 15 mom's, "what would you do if you walked into your kids workspace and saw them quickly minimize a window". Guess what? We got 15 different answers, ranging from "death" to "ignore".
#2: We have several parents who simply need the technical skills to understand stuff like open dns and blocking at the router. We installed filtering software for them, and spend quite a bit of time helping them understand how to use these tools. see point #1, some parents need boku-blocking, other, none.
#3: the argument that parents should be watching their kids 24/7 to monitor and supervise their internet usage is bullshit. I've got a 2 year old, and I barely have time to keep my house clean. That being said, we use this safety PACT becuase many parents don't even know how to set rules with their kids about internet use in the house.
#4: we teach parents about safe search, and spend so much time talking about profiles, and helping parents talk to their kids about safe internet usage. This tool would be "another tool in the belt" for us folks in schools. Guys, parents aren't geeks, eh?
The analogy is sound. The children's area of the library is one where you can let a child browse freely and explore his own interests with minimal supervision. So long as you trust your child to remain in that area, you know that you don't need to personally vet each piece of content he wants to view. If anything, the Freedom to Read statment makes the analogy more apt. There's nothing but trust stopping him from wandering off to an uncensored section of the library -- the librarians shouldn't step in. This is just as there's presumably nothing but trust stopping the child from going to the address bar and wandering to an uncensored section of the interent -- the suggestion was a safe zone, not browser censoring software.
These discussions always have someone on a high horse insisting that personally babysitting your child through life is the only course of action. There's never any thought about the child growing up and being able to be trusted. Eventually he can hopefully be trusted with no supervision at all, but until then, baby-steps like a safe zone at a library or on the internet are helpful.
Web filtering software.
Advertising is inappropriate. (uh oh!)
Naked people are just fine, as long as they are all-natural and non-perverted. No fake tits, weird piercings, or fucked up eyebrows allowed. Use correct hole. Limited educational exceptions may apply.
Guns are fine. Brain splatter is fine.
Anything that presents drug use (including alcohol and tobacco) or gambling in a non-negative light is inappropriate.
Intelligent design is inappropriate, except when being ridiculed.
Games are inappropriate, except for tetris and chess.
Terrible grammar is inappropriate. (want business grade, not perfection)
Endorsement of irresponsible behavior is inappropriate.
do people who cover up outlets disgusts you?
What country?
100 to 120 volts is a learning experience. 220 to 250 volts tends to prevent learning.
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.'"
Yes , i remember . Try finding a good book on programming in the kids section.
All the good books about programming were in the adult section.
Luckily my father usually grabbed them for me.
Slipping shoelaces ?
is quite possibly not what I consider inappropriate. I considered violence and guns inappropriate for under 10s without adult supervision. Many people on your side of the Atlantic are much more worried about a 13 year old doing a picture search for stuff that has never hurt anyone.
Talk to your kids. Educate them. Explain what you think is good and bad and why this is so. If my kids looked at stuff they shouldn't have, they did it quietly and unobtrusively. The only thing I didn't like was MSN messenger and I taught them the do's and don'ts of that as well.
Then set them up an account for YouTube and restrict the access it gives. If you have educated them properly, they should respect your preferences enough not to rub it in your face.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
That's true, but "never let your child use the Internet, at all, without you sitting right there" is a wildly impractical idea.
and pressure group with an axe to grind would be setting their lawyers on Google for including harry potter or what ever.
RTFM
Think Of The Children!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well done, detective Sherlock. Very well done.
You have successfully detected the sarcasm in my language.
We already have a Walled Garden for the frightened to use to babysit their brats. It's called "TV", and it's enough.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Many of the comments I read have some common themes:
1) You suck as a parent. Spend some time with your kid on the internet, instead of abdicating your parental responsibilities to a giant corporation. It's called being a parent, you loser.
2) This isn't reasonable. This requires too much human effort. This isn't the way Google works.
3) There isn't a common understanding of what should be in the fence and what should be out of the fence. Everyone's morals are different. And movie ratings suck, too.
Some things to think about:
1) An important aspect of being a parent is giving your children progressive levels of responsibility and risk. That's why you teach them to swim in a swimming pool, not a class 5 rapid. Movie ratings aren't perfect, but at least it gives you some idea what to expect. For kids between 9 and 12, a movie rating of PG is not a bad first cut what might be appropriate. So, an internet safe zone would be a great way for kids to have some exposure to internet searches without getting the full firehose.
2) Yeah, the implementation details have some challenges. Too bad Google doesn't have a way to use automation to filter out masses of material as inappropriate. Oh wait, they do. Context, content, nuance, meaning, matching. That stuff is the BOMB these days. It's not like back in the day when computers were stupid.
3) Yeah, a common understanding might be a bit challenging on the boundary cases. But within some wide parameters, say language, off the top of my head, there are some fairly common understandings of whether something belongs in the kids' side or on the adults' side.
I think there is a definite market here. Just like there's a market in child safety seats, kid-sized bikes, Chucky Cheese, playgrounds, swimming pools, and all the myriad other ways parents will spend money to provide filtered environments for their kids.
While we're at it, a kid filter for Wikipedia would be great. You just never know what's going to pop up in a Wikipedia search.
In fact, I think I'll go write up a business plan. Heck, large amounts of venture capital has been thrown at far stupider ideas.
As a parent of now a 12 year old. Those sorts of content controlled websites exist. Disney runs one. http://www.webkinz.com/ , http://www.seussville.com/ etc..
Its a bit difficult to figure out what parents want to censor in terms of all user created content. Its not hard to just have restricted sites and whitelist them.
http://kids.yahoo.com/
Nowhere does it say that we have a right to an internet without objectionable material. If some company wants to provide this as a (paid) service, more power to them.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
It's a product called "Kidzui". It consists of a bunch of whitelisted sites, videos and other content whitelisted by parents and teachers.
By paying for a service you can avoid it being brought to you by Fruity Pebbles, which is what "Google Kids" would be.
The problem with having a 'Google kids' search engine; is currently there is minimal webmaster assistance. Not very many major websites use PICS labelling as safe for kids; PICS labelling/RSAC is more complicated than "kid friendly / not kid friendly" and requires self-labelling involving several questions "violence rating, nudity rating, sex rating, and language rating". Again: if more sites published self-ratings, matters would be a lot easier.
Also, a site may be perfectly safe, but what about all its links? What about the contents of linked pages unexpectedly changing, domain expired, unsavory content being introduced through user-generated postings/comments/replies, or what have you?
Policing the content of sites and their links is no easy job, and Google could be creating a huge risk to its reputation on creating a "Google kids" system; Google already has 'Safe Search' and 'Lock Safe Search on' options, which filter search results, and possible errors in that filtering are risky enough as it is...
I think a community effort is required. Since the Internet is worthy of having a .XXX TLD.
Perhaps there should be a .KIDS TLD?
Sites that are kid-safe or have a combination of kid-safe and not kid-safe content, could then list under the .KIDS TLD.
.KIDS.
Sites that are intended for adults would have no presence under
Specifically, perhaps there should be a TLD for websites and domains geared towards children. The agreement regarding conditions of registering a domain on the TLD could include some prescriptive rules about what content may be published on .KIDS domains
(rather than asking Webmasters to create special metadata tags) for example in the .KIDS TLD:
The idea then, is safe sites geared towards kids would be on the .KIDS TLD,
and the parent could configure their browser to restrict access to sites not on a .KIDS domain.
Then search engines could easily offer a '.KIDS' TLD search option
My son recently turned 7, and is quite the proto-gamer. He's got his own steam account, and he is a Minecraft/Terraria addict.
About a year or so ago, he started his youtube fix: he wanted to watch 'how-to'/review videos for transformers, star wars, and lego toys. This posed a major dilemma for me: he really enjoys watching the videos, but lets face it, there is a lot of 'inappropriate' language. One day, after telling him to skip a video for the nth time, I simply decided to stop the censorship. I sat him down, and taught him all the dirty words. We talked about reasonable limits. I.e. things he's allowed to search for, and when he needs to stop following the 'related path'. I told him point blank that I have high expectations for him, but I trust him. I can't protect him from the world, but I can shape his interpretation of it. He knows that if he imitates some of the bad language/behaviour, he's going to get an internet 'grounding'.
I take the same approach for his gaming fix: he's allowed to play a wide assortment of games, but only on his own, or with ppl he knows IRL. He has an email address, and a skype account, but he knows that they are 'family' only.
His computer (my old gaming rig) is right beside where I work, and we talk about what he is seeing/hearing. I probably won't know for a few years how things turn out from a moral perspective, but I do know that his reading/writing/logic skills are substantially more advanced than his peers. At 7 (grade 1), he is reading the minecraft wiki, and his google-fu is starting to develop. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens when he takes his iPad with him when he visits his Grandma's house this summer.
None of my kids were allowed to use the Internet for anything but schoolwork until they were 12 (no email address either), and even then all computer use was easily monitored by having the computer in a common area of our house.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I have to wonder if anybody else remember Yahoolagins (Now Yahoo Kids) and how it changed after to become an all-encompassing web portal of kids stuff and a search engine?
You are trying to get your internet filtering installed on the wrong side of the eyeballs. It doesn't belong there, it won't work there. Give up. Put the filter in the correct place and it works for books newspapers and TV too.
One word: lawyers
Seriously, there must be thousands of salivating lawyers out there waiting for this to happen. Your kid got called a bad name online... SUE THE PARENTS! Your kid's grades were posted online by a classmate... SUE THE PARENTS!
With the litigation happy country the US has become, this will never work. But hey, it could give lazy parents one more thing to blame when their kid "fails" in life and doesn't achieve that 7-figure salary within a year of graduating, right?
TOTLOL showed parent-rated videos from youtube. My son used to love it. Unfortunately, the creator wasn't able to find a profitable way of exploiting it (I bought a subscription) so it died eventually. The great thing was, that you could leave your kid (mine was three) alone and let them browse related videos without being afraid they'd get stuck in something weird or incomprehensible. There's enough appropriate material on youtube and anyone can embed it, so what's stopping you?
NB: While googling for TOTLOL I found this one: http://video.kidzui.com/ looks similar. Better check it out!
Another kids site that's too good to die: www.poissonrouge.com (french, but there's no real language barrier)
Things like this would exist if there was actually any market whatsoever for them.
The trouble is: those demanding them are not prepared to do the work themselves; instead, they demand that others restrict the services they offer.
Wikipedia got this for years and eventually told the people demanding it to go away and do it themselves if they wanted it. Notice how the people wanting this don't go to the trouble of setting up a filtering service themselves - no, they demand it be filtered at the source. They do this consistently.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Tell that to Gary McKinnon.
Or all the people arrested for CP offences for having a photo of their 17 y/o girlfriend in a country where the age of consent is 16 but the local government has been "persuaded" to set the bar for Indecent Material at 18 by prudish American legislators.
America isn't the world, but it is the big, pushy kid on the block who wants everyone to play by his rules.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
Because Google's business model relies on advertising, and it's morally reprehensible to advertise to kids anyway. If they did do it it would have to be as a tax writeoff.
Do you know how hard that video was for me to find because you didn't put a link into your reply? I had to ask my kid for help to find it.
DaveyJJ
Because you can switch SafeSearch to strict filtering? Duh.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
google would never do this... You can't track kids, (illegal.) You can't sell their information, (illegal.) You can't sell them stuff, (no credit card.)
here's an idea... instead of having some company try to develop software that allows you to leave your child unattended on the Internet, why don't you set aside some time with them and go through the videos TOGETHER?!?! It's called "parenting". You should try it sometime.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
Suppose the US passed a law tomorrow that all US web users can only reach web servers hosted in the US, would it even be possible to say that any telecom company with lines going between the US and another country will block any http requests where the client is inside and the server is outside? Because if it is (and I suspect it is possible right now with existing technology) then have the US select a port besides 80 (any futzing about with 80 would lead to first amendment groups being total turds about it), give it a new 3/4 letter protocol name. Give a year or so to grandfather in existing kid safe sites like nickjr.com and pbskids.org. Since only US servers would be possible, the US would have jurisdictional authority to persue abusers and/or deal with non-compliant sites. Foreign sites could easily host on the channel by having servers inside the US. Google could index it all day long, and theoretically it's already been vetted. The last piece would be to allow users to choose if they want to block access to port 80 either to their house or their kid's pc or whatever. I suppose a certain critical mass of content would be necessary before it becomes a realistic option to block 80. Maybe sites available on the new port would require something similar to an ssl certificate, except not for encryption, just for identification purposes and to make then centrally revokable.
I think culturally this idea has a few things working for it. For one, I would hope that btards and anonidiots would have better things to do than hack nickjr's front page to put up some boobs or something, but I've given up trying to predict what the less mature black hat script kiddies think is funny. Maybe it would lead to a new crop of white hats who strive to find and report vulnerabilities. And if you report it to the site owner and they don't care, you'd have the option of reporting to the govt who could then threaten to revoke their license (kicking them off the new port but leaving 80 intact of course). Maybe Youtube could implement something like the moderation algorithm that has been kicked around on here.. you upload a video, you think it's kid safe so you flag it.. if 95% of random voters agree, then your video is made available on the "clean version" of Youtube.
I could go on, but you get the idea.. 1, set up a new thing, 2, block foreign servers (establish enforceable jurisdiction), 3, content providers provide content, 4, consumers have a choice, 5, uses mostly existing technology, 6, not too big a pain in any one person's ass.
I am not exactly sure what he thinks the safesearch option is for.
googling for it, the right solution turned up after 1 minute:
http://www.corenetworkz.com/2010/12/enable-google-safesearch-for-firerfox.html
Its called locking and was discussed in the google blog.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/locking-safesearch.html
(And yes, your child will circumvent it at some point, and if its that far also a "google kids" domain wouldnt help - google cant fix the whole internet)
This is why the new 'think of the children' TLD should have been .kids, not .xxx. Configure your transparent proxy to only allow connections from your child's computer to .kids domains. Done. Good luck filtering .com, .org, .net, etc.
Google isn't really equipped to solve this problem. They're in the business of getting it right "most of the time" or giving the best answer it can find, whether or not it's appropriate. They do a remarkably good job but sometimes they get it very wrong.
In a kids-only website you have to curate the content somehow with trusted editors, b/c you can't afford even one mistake (the way at least in the US kids are protected by law and politics). So Google isn't a good fit.
There is a site recently bought by Disney called Togetherville that solves the problem in an interesting way. You basically use your facebook social network as a kind of oauth/openid for your kids. You pick out people from your social network who you say are "trusted" to play with your kids online. Then the kids get access to these people in a controlled environment, to share videos, and do whatever you might want to do in a little social network sandbox..
I think it's a clever idea of making child-adult-internet resource authorization simple for parents (and outsourcing a lot of the tech and mgmt to FB), and apparently so did Disney. And it's cool that it doesn't require a traditional internet filter or any kind of content white list. It's just a way of managing a list of adults who aren't going to let your kids get into hot water. Put the onus on the parent's judgment of their relationships, which is exactly how it works in the real world.
looks like a parent looking for another babysitter. is the tv not good enough anymore?
...
Regardless of click through disclaimers Google would be sued left, right, and center for failures even if they achieved 99.999% success so there is no way they can do it. There would also be companies that would market toward children then and since children are impressionable they probably won't understand the value of privacy. So Google could be sued for facilitating companies. Doesn't matter if anyone wins although I'm sure there will be a few wins, most will fail but the real expense will be legal costs defending themselves with many cases simply settled. If you didn't know that's how lawyers pay their bills.