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Google Confirms That It's Designing Kid-Friendly Versions of Its Services
An anonymous reader writes USA Today reports that rumors about Google working on specific services catering to young kids are true. From the article: "With Google processing 40,000 search queries a second — or 1.2 trillion a year — it's a safe bet that many of those doing the Googling are kids. Little surprise then that beginning next year the tech giant plans to create specific versions of its most popular products for those 12 and younger. The most likely candidates are those that are already popular with a broad age group, such as search, YouTube and Chrome. 'The big motivator inside the company is everyone is having kids, so there's a push to change our products to be fun and safe for children,' Pavni Diwanji, the vice president of engineering charged with leading the new initiative, told USA TODAY. 'We expect this to be controversial, but the simple truth is kids already have the technology in schools and at home,' says the mother of two daughters, ages 8 and 13. 'So the better approach is to simply see to it that the tech is used in a better way.'"
besides the obvious filtering of content, will Google also be limiting advertisements and tracking of kids searches?
Hi have 8 years old twins that are starting to discover both google and youtube and they still ask me for direction (we're from a non-english speaking country) and so I'm able to filter out "bad" stuff from the start but I was actually started to get concerned about how I can make sure they don't end up in those weird corners of the internet.
I'm not worried about sex, as we had various talks on the subject and we're open about that (though after all the talks I actually find concepts like sex stores or sex toys harder to explain than how are babies made), but I am concerned about violence and generally "bad ideas" related content.
Since we're on Ubuntu I was wondering if there's any product similar to netnanny so for now I was relying on using youtube logged out which is/was supposed to ask you to login once you hit stuff that has been marked as inappropriate. Or relying on the Safe Search filter on google.
But this sounds like a better idea, I guess I can create them separate users on my linux machines with specially configured chrome profiles that will stick them to these kids-saf versions. If it all works like they describe it, of course.
Curiously yours, crip.
Will this be a darknet, where google and wikipedia pretend that santa claus exists?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I'm really glad Google are taking this on. This is just a challenging age group because so much mental/cognative development occurs in this time. Something that is increadibly informative for a 7 year old can quite uninteresting to a 10 year old. Finding a way to make it instructive, intuitive, and generally usefull without alienating age groups will be challenging. I'm curious what they come up with.
Profiling from birth, so Google and those who pay to use its data can select next level of people that work for them easier and suppress the rest.
followed by Yahooligans!
Turning on safe search on image search engines and figuring out keywords to find porn.
Just like Camel cigarettes used to do, get 'em while they're young.
... they'll have buy the domain name from the makers of googoo clusters though.
"I'm sorry, I can't find anything for monogamy. Perhaps you'd like to research transsexual group anal sex orgies instead?"
Futurist Traditionalism
COPPA - Children's Online Privacy Protection Act is the law they are attempting to skirt through directed effort, which defines a child for the sake of all its protection as an individual under 13.
(1) IN GENERAL.â"It is unlawful for an operator of a website or online service directed to children, or any operator that has actual knowledge that it is collecting personal information from a child, to collect personal information from a child in a manner that violates the regulations prescribed under subsection (b). ... and it continues.
I wonder how they expect to monetize or indoctrinate this audience. As long as they don't violate the terms of the privacy law (which got iOS contact-stealing app company Path fined $800,000, in part for collecting on children) they can run a kid's site. This means that as long as they aren't wantonly scarfing details, they can still pitch sugar cereals.
I wonder if the Inbox project the first of kind?
I would image that this is in response to Chromebooks beating out iPads in schools. Smart move by Google. Even smarter if they don't target kids for ads. That would probably make parents happy and raise the perception of Google.
The way Google has implemented image search, the thumbnails that come back are incredibly difficult to filter even using DNS services. Sure, you can set Safe Mode in the browser, but all a kid needs to do is open a different browser, delete cookies or go into private mode. The current best approach that I'm aware of is URL re-writing (to force-append the safe search parameter to every request) - and that is beyond what most people can do with a home wireless router. Something like creating kids.google.com would go a long way to making this easy for parents (in conjunction with something like OpenDNS).
he big motivator inside the company is everyone is having kids,
Yeah right.
The average age of an employee is still in the mid to late 20s. Those that start having families and kids leave and are replaced by new employees who don't yet have kids.
"[...] there's a push to change our products to be fun and safe for children." If it becomes funnier and safer I'll better use the kids version.
... Like Apple dumbified the NextSetp interface for Mac OSX, is the design for kid specifications the thing Google calls "Material Design"?
I wonder how they expect to monetize or indoctrinate this audience.
monetisation - the parents will like Google for this, so use Google, so see ads. Child version ad-supported by their parents usage.
indoctrinate - they'll get used to using Google for search, email etc. Naturally on becoming a teenager they'll switch to the adult version, knowing and trusting the Google brand. Or perhaps a teenage version that'll exist by then.
Very easy for Google to comply with COPPA. If Google knows they're a child then serve them the child version (no ads, no/limited tracking), if they don't they they don't have 'actual knowledge' and therefore aren't liable (eg if they're logged on with their parents account Google cannot know it's a child using the service).
Tracking probably will exist but be limited - available to the parents for monitoring purposes (assuming that's an allowed usage under COPPA) but otherwise not used (unlike tracking data from the adult version).
You aren't worried about sex, and you let 8 year olds use the internet. Worst parent of the year!