Slashdot Mirror
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?
I would imagine it will be targeting adverts at kids, and tracking just as much.
How hard is it to provide www.youtube.com along with kids.youtube.com and let folks decide for themselves where to go?
PBS is quite capable of broadcasting child friendly content without worrying about how to make certain that it really is being watched by kids. Nor are they really concerned that a kid could switch from PBS to Cinemax. That's the role of the parents.
Content provider provide content. Parents parent.