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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.
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.
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
The corporation shall educate your child accordingly
Listen - I won't argue that Google hasn't left behind something important with its "Don't be evil" philosophy.
But compared to 'adult' power morality in our nation, Google is still relatively saintly.
Our latest answer to violence is crueler violence - our adults are failing the most basic tests of civilization just to see their opponents squirm and laugh at it.
I think the kids are the sanest folks left, given the studies I've seen on how they're handling all this - and Google is one of the least horrible influences.
Trust Google.
Google is there to keep you safe.
Use Google Products.
Give All your Data To Google.
Google Will Keep It Safe.
Sincerely,
Google for Kids
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.
I hate fat people.
Other non google versions exist. I know that the Boy Scouts has a program for this through a partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. It is also requirement at least at that cub scout level. I also know that my kids public school district uses the Scouts's program in their elementary school as it is available for anyone to use.
Time to offend someone
Corporations are not the best role models at all. Period. They do underhanded and devious things all of the time so the last entity that I want teaching my child about morals is a fucking corporation.
You _can_ use better passwords, you _can_ be more careful with your social graph, these things are relatively simple to get right enough for most people. They are mostly geared towards protecting you from third-party activity which has not taken control of the infrastructure of the products you are using.
Yes, you could teach sixth graders about changing settings and using DuckDuckGo, but realistically the problem isn't the search engine or browser you use, it's the products you use. Yes, using Google for a search engine could expose various things to Google - but it's all the sites you go to that are strip-mining your information and selling it to each other, they don't need Google to do that. If you're using Facebook, then switching from Google to DuckDuckGo isn't helping you much. Likewise if you're using Amazon or YouTube or any other site. You're up against adversaries who control the horizontal and the vertical, there's not a lot you can do which isn't comparable to using crystals or magnets to address your arthritis. Hell, millions of people install malware-protection programs which turn out to be actual malware! THEY PAY FOR IT! We simply aren't equipped to effectively deal with this scale of issue at an individual level.
I think Google has good incentives to help teach you, the individual end-user, to avoid scams perpetrated by other individual end users (nigerian prince, identity theft), and also against organized and opportunistic data-collectors (black market trading in password databases types of things). And those are issues you actually can improve based on your actions. But protecting yourself from having Google or MasterCard or Target "steal" your privacy is a tough problem, individuals can only really solve it by opting out, or supporting regulatory changes.
American parents. I don't really see a better alternative. Google has its wrongs, but I do not really see too many, if any institutions which have any more moral perspectives than Google.
Right. Now Yemeni or Venezuelan parents, they're the shizzle.
It's always those dang Americans ...
While people can complain about how corporations may act behind the scenes, there is a huge problem right now with people who fall for what most of us might consider an obvious scam. Phishing attacks, phone calls "from Microsoft", and "Your computer is sending out viruses, let us come in and we will fix it for you" type things are becoming increasingly common. If Google is going to do a good thing and teach kids not to fall for these types of scams, is that REALLY a bad thing? We are not talking about classes talking about corporate ethics, we are talking about some pretty straight forward stuff that kids SHOULD be taught from an early age.