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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?
Google kids? Why don't you have a seat over there.
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.
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
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.
'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.
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."
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.
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.
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.