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Google Is Teaching Children How To Act Online. Is It the Best Role Model? (nytimes.com)

Google is positioning itself in schools as a trusted authority on digital citizenship at a moment when the company's data-handling practices are under growing scrutiny. From a report: Google is on a mission to teach children how to be safe online. That is the message behind "Be Internet Awesome," a so-called digital-citizenship education program that the technology giant developed for schools. The lessons include a cartoon game branded with Google's logo and blue, red, yellow and green color palette. The game is meant to help students from third grade through sixth guard against schemers, hackers and other bad actors. Google plans to reach five million schoolchildren with the program this year and has teamed up with the National Parent Teacher Association to offer related workshops to parents. But critics say the company's recent woes -- including revelations that it was developing a censored version of its search engine for the Chinese market and had tracked the whereabouts of users who had explicitly turned off their location history -- should disqualify Google from promoting itself in schools as a model of proper digital conduct.

3 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. Don't be Evil by Tulsa_Time · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Too late...

    Google motto 2004: Don’t be evil
    Google motto 2010: Evil is tricky to define
    Google motto 2013: We make military robots... also, we help Hillary overthrow governments and help the Chinese oppress their people
    Google motto 2017: Trump is evil
    Google motto 2018: We do not care what you think, we are Evil, deal with it.

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    5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
  2. No, parents should be handling that by KixWooder · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Except at the current, neither is,otherwise you wouldn't have the likes of 4chan and reddit, where you say one thing and you called a cuck and doxed.

    Finally someone snaps does real harm or causes harm to themselves. Thoughts and prayers abound and suicide prevention hotlines are posted, when it wouldn't be needed if people were just nicer to one another online and in real life.

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    I hate fat people.
  3. Re:Sure. by dcw3 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No, just because you've read about a few jackasses in the news, tv or interweb, doesn't make it the norm for the vast majority of parents. Those are all busy catching eyeballs to increase revenue with the latest train wreck...it's just not reality. Why do you think we hear stories about some beautiful young getting killed or kidnapped, for weeks, and yet every single day there are multiple murders across the entire country. It's because they're not interested in reporting the actual news, they just want your attention to sell ads.

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    Just another day in Paradise