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Censorware Failure: Kiddle's "Child-Safe" Search Engine (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In a bid to protect young internet users from inappropriate content, a new visual search engine designed for children has launched this week. Kiddle.co filters its results so that only 'safe' sites are displayed and page descriptions are written in simple language. It also claims to get rid of indecent images and 'bad words.' However, tests have revealed that the odd risque image will still slip by into the listings. The words 'gay' and 'lesbian' have also controversially been removed from the 'child-friendly' platform. Other reports claimed that references to killing rabbits, naked images of Vanessa Hudgens and Khloe Kardashian's sex tape had initially slipped into the results. While Kiddle, based in the U.S. and the Netherlands, is a separate and unrelated venture to Google, the system uses the web giant's safe search mode in addition to its own team of human editors to pick out the unsuitable content.
children in western countries are over protected and coddled, and as result, even as adults they have a warped sense of the world; they see moral landscape of the world simplistically, preach 'tolerance' of everything, but feel entitled to a lot, ignore the costs of that entitlement(be it blood or money), etc etc
when those who are paying the costs ( be it victims/instruments of their governments) refuse to pay(voting for 'outsiders' or perhaps resist violently or otherwise), they are branded racists, reactionaries, or terrorists,
of course in the long run those who pay will end up with the upper hand. its a ugly future for the coddled masses in west .
Not sure I'd want my kid using a 'visual search engine' that's a portmanteau of 'kid' and 'diddle'.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Internet censorship doesn't work?? Oh, come on! Next you'll be trying to tell us that Ebay is a bunch of crooks.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
It's not about sexual preference, it's about relationship preference. Very simple: some men grow up and end up marrying men, and some women grow up and marry other women. No one's asking they be taught about scissoring or anal.
Make another internet just for kids.
Really.
We already have mobile versions of websites. Why not kid versions? Little Billy can go to Samsung.kid and get treated the kid friendly page, instead of blah blah blah about investor relations and global operations etc. If Samsung doesn't want to put in a kid page with cartoons advertising their wares, they can just not have anything at all
Other educational sites can operate at whatever level of maturity the account holder can view.
Don't allow anonymous access. Have registration through the school system. Make it a crime to post content unsuitable for children on it.
I can see this not being ideal when you might start expecting a child to do research into subjects. 11? 12?
But younger than that, I can't see why children would need anything close to unfettered web access.
It still has the pitfalls of stolen identities/credentials being used to view or post inappropriate content.
And how do you handle children posting bad content? That I do not know.
death is a bad word, die is not. mass grave is not, 2 clicks later I am looking at something I don't want to look at. suicide is a bad word, but right to die is okay. Searching for gay or lesbian returns a special message "You have entered an LGBT related search query. Please realize that while Kiddle has nothing against the LGBT community, it's hard to guarantee the safety of all the search results for such queries. We recommend that you talk to your parent or guardian about such topics." searching for suicide or kill myself just returns the same bad word message. Gun is a bad word, rifle and pistol is not. deep throat is banned, throat deep is not.
Why did they choose a mad looking robot as the mascot?
Demand to censor all the religious texts. You know, the ones where they stone people to death, and where they nail the good guys to crosses. That's scary for kids! Scarring them for life! Get rid of that filth!
Then let the religious nuts and the SJWs duke it out. I bring the popcorn.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, it does explain it if you search for it:
"You have entered an LGBT related search query. Please realize that while Kiddle has nothing against the LGBT community, it's hard to guarantee the safety of all the search results for such queries. We recommend that you talk to your parent or guardian about such topics."
Ie, the search term leads to too much porn to be able to filter out.
Since when are sites that require "Adobe Flash" safe for kids when a child can be manipulated into turning on the camera and microphone in the flash settings?
I can agree with this, remove the label and have it divided into 'sexually explicit' and not and I have no issues with it, so long as that's the line.
Sadly, I suspect it's really an attempt to filter gay/lesbian relationships from reality, which I do have an issue with.
My kid is being taught in school at gr 2 that some families have 2 mommys and some have 2 daddys, and I have no problem with it. I wouldn't want her to use a search engine that was less open then her school.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Unfortunately that's the exact excuse often used to block the discussion of LGBT issue. The exact claim varies, sometimes it's "it will be too confusing for children" and sometimes it's "we can't separate out the sexual aspects", but it all basically boils down to claiming that because there is effort involved it must be censored. Straight relationships require no effort to describe because they are "normal".
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I entered an ambiguous search term: "cute chicks", figuring a child-friendly search engine would probably show me pics of fuzzy baby chickens:
- It's either broken or incredibly slow. I waited...and waited...and waited... What is it, do the editors manually answer every query?
- I went to KidzSearch, which is also powered by Google Safe Search, entered the same term, and there are simply zero results. Zero?
- Enter the same term in Google Safe Search, and the top five results are baby chickens. So the search term works.
Ok, so I was trying to trick them, so let's try something ordinary: "puppies". Still zero results, even though Google Safe Search has zillions. Same result, i.e., nothing happened. I guess it's kid-safe if you never return any results. Boring, but safe...
- - - - -
Update: I tried refreshing the page, with the search term "puppies". This time I got a clear message "looks like your query contained some bad words." Bad puppies, bad! Somebody whack this site with a rolled up newspaper.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
> How do you explain it to your kids when they see two women kiss at a public restaurant.
explain it to the kids? i run over and start stuffing dollar bills down their shirts
"So long and thanks for all the fish."