Why Doesn't 'Google Kids' Exist? 561
theodp writes "Slate's Michael Agger wishes there was a website his 6-year-old son could visit on his own to watch amateur Star Wars Lego movies and other stuff he's curious about. 'But I don't leave him alone on YouTube,' he laments, 'because I never know if some strange-ass video will appear in the 'Related Videos' section.' Agger suggests that Google should create Google Kids, a search engine that filters the Web for children. 'Think back to when you were a kid and your parents dropped you off at the library,' explains Agger. 'In the children's section, the only "inappropriate" stuff to be found was Judy Blume's Forever, which someone's older sister had usually already checked out anyway. Similarly, Google Kids would be a sort of children's section of the Web, focused on providing high-quality results based on age.'"
Google Kids = Legal obligation/legal minefield (Score:5, Insightful)
Google's not a charity, either. (Score:5, Insightful)
It surely would be a Nice Thing to make a playground on the Internet for kids, but why should Google bother to do it? Go make it yourself if it's such a good idea. "Oh, I don't have the resources to do that," you say. Well... there you go. Google isn't a charity.
Now, YouTube Kids or something like that, maybe you can see something there. (Think, vetted content from the likes of Nickelodeon and PBS, actually rated as 'G' or 'E' or whatever by a real ratings agency.) It's probably easier to get profitable advertising in videos there as well; kids can't be the best at operating click-through ads.
Re:Google's not a charity, either. (Score:5, Insightful)
In the United States, The King's Speech drew an R rating from the MPAA. (Apparently, they objected to the use of profanity - including the dreaded 'fuck' - even in the context of speech therapy.) No youth under the age of 17 is allowed to see the film in theaters without an accompanying adult parent or guardian. The same goes for Billy Elliot and Erin Brockovich.
The Lord of the Rings films, meanwhile, get a PG-13, despite impalements, beheadings, and the deaths of thousands. Casino Royale gets a PG-13, even with all its James Bond violence, and the sadistic clubbing of the protagonist's testicles while he's tied to a chair.
All moral issues must be absolutely black and white--any adult who lets a teenager have a glass of wine must be a drug-addled older sibling living a life of failure, a corrupt businessman (Mafia or inside trader about to be brought down), or a pedophile. Any reference to sexuality will be harshly punished, and the children absolutely must be protected from anything but stereotypical portrayals of asexual homosexuality. (Homosexual males are child-safe only if they are portrayed shopping, prancing, lisping, and looking fabulous--surrounded only by women.)
That's no world in which to raise a child.
Re:Google's not a charity, either. (Score:4, Insightful)
In real life the rating agencies are pretty damn helpful. You aren't thinking like a parent...
I suppose I'm not, if I'm a parent that believes naughty words are less obscene (and less harmful) than the graphic fetishization of violence and torture. Or perhaps I'm a parent that believes it's important to teach children than homosexuality (or even the idea that gay people are normal people like everyone else) is scary and obscene. You think that kids don't clue in to what is forbidden nearly as quickly as they see what is allowed?
The ratings systems are fine for me as a parent if I respond to exactly the same (far right-wing, hyper-Christian) morality cues as the MPAA. Otherwise, I'm teaching my children to be numb to violence, to feel dirty about healthy sexuality, to be titillated by the forbidden four-letter words, and to be fearful of homosexuals.
Re:Google's not a charity, either. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is to even have a shot at making something like this work right now, you'd have to have actual humans vet and whitelist websites, videos and everything else on a one-by-one basis. And even then, everything would have to be re-reviewed every so often to make sure nothing new slipped through the cracks on "clean" website. There's no way ad revenue alone would cover an undertaking like that. Whatever it ended up being would have to be subscription-based, which in the end isn't really all that different from current web filtering options available.
A child-safe corner of the internet sounds lovely, but until it's possible to fully automate the process and be 100% sure nothing "unsafe" slips through, it's probably not going to happen on any grand scale.
Re:Google's not a charity, either. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is to even have a shot at making something like this work right now, you'd have to have actual humans vet and whitelist websites, videos and everything else on a one-by-one basis.
Not only that, but you will immediately have problems with cross culture compatibility... I'm pretty sure you would not get objections from the Amish, but pretty much every other group will want things skewed to {support / justify / defend} the basic cultural prejudice required by said groups.
You need a license to drive a car but any moron can raise a Dahmer or even a Hitler in their own home.
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Yes because kids have so much disposable income.
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Also, Google's thing is generally to come up with search algorithms to *automatically* give you something like what you're probably looking for. The sort of "Kid's section" for the internet would need a high level of judgement, and therefore would need to be curated. That's not really the sort of thing that Google does.
I don't think it's a horrible idea. In general, with all the excessive amount of information on the Internet, I'd love to see some higher quality curation to really point people in the di
Why aren't parents actually being parents? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about actually being a parent? Sitting down with your child and help them use the Internet safely is far better than trying to either force the usage of filtering applications or ranting about why the content is there to begin with.
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The problem is that's your problem and not Google's problem. I honestly couldn't care less about your frustration and Google shouldn't have to, either.
If you don't want your children to view certain sites, it's your responsibility to either see that they don't(which is a very difficult thing to do), or, hey, you could also teach them things like the difference between right and wrong and judgement skills and compassion and things like that so that they'll be good people anyway and it won't matter what sites
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Re:Why aren't parents actually being parents? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's one thing to have rules and restrictions, it's another to babysit them every moment of their life. You find age-appropriate toys and books and tv series and movies and games, you don't sit shoulder reading in case someone decided to cut to hardcore porn. Like I remember I was asked to help once, the parents had an IM app installed to chat to their grandparents and some friends and family and all that, paid enough attention to who but didn't watch their every move. Well, turns out spambots were sending messages with porn links, and the kids were the age they'd click almost anything. So they asked me for help, is there some setting so they only get messages from people on their friend list. If anyone needed to be added, they'd vet them first.
To me that's a perfectly sane attitude. The Internet is a mix of a whole lot of stuff, some obviously designed for 18+ people. And if you completely deny them web surfing, they will miss out on a *lot*. So you want to find some middle ground where you have some scope of control - like who they talk to on IM, but not everything they ever said. Just like they get to walk public streets but not into strip clubs, it doesn't mean you have to walk them door to door.
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This strikes me as something better solved on the client end than on the internet end. If somebody feels that strongly about it, they shouldn't be depending upon Google or somebody else to know what's appropriate for their children. I get that it's time consuming to constantly baby sit kids, but you don't have to. When I was a kid, we were turned loose with a bunch of other kids and that handled much of the time. Society hasn't gotten any more dangerous in the last 30 years, despite the opinions that some f
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I think this attitude of "we must find only age appropriate activities and content for our precious widdle childwen" is a fairly new concept. When I was a kid, there was no particular effort to review or control what was consumed nor what was provided. Yeah, there was Tipper Gore and all that shit, but when it came down to a parental level. We didn't even have special video games for kids, like we do today. Videogames were just games and you played them or you didn't.
I mean, really, I don't get what the big
Re:Why aren't parents actually being parents? (Score:5, Funny)
Now? I'm a furry. How do you think I turned out?
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What we have now is simply more ways for kids to see, not do, but see things that some think is dangerous. We are not in the age where girls go out to the woods to explor
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Parents use the Internet as a babysitting tool more often than not these days. Then when they find that little Johnny or Judy finds something inappropriate on the Internet they cry foul about it and say that it shouldn't be on the Internet for their kids to find thus punishing everyone else. Or they run to some filtering program to hopefully block the bad stuff and then the kid finds their way around it and then the parent has a fit about it.
How about actually being a parent? Sitting down with your child and help them use the Internet safely is far better than trying to either force the usage of filtering applications or ranting about why the content is there to begin with.
Is there a website that auto-generates these canned responses every time someone asks about appropriate use of the internet for kids? I'd much rather my 7yo worried about why their friends were mean to them today than the logistics of DP if such an image springs forth from the computer. If such an image did spring forth then I'd like to be around to answer any questions they might have, as awkward as they might be, but i'd still rather it didn't happen at all.
And what's this "punishing everyone else" crap?
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Kids' video or kids video? Quite a large legal distinction to make before clicking through..
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Rule 34 - raping your childhood since 1996.
Re:Why aren't parents actually being parents? (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you ever used the Internet? Simple searches for kids cartoons can come up with several pornographic spoofs on the first page
Really? Turn safe search on and give me a non-pornographic phrase to type into google that will give me pornography on the first page.
Re:Why aren't parents actually being parents? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. They should do their jobs, and pony up for an X-Box. That way their kids can learn to massacare their enemies in a safe and supportive environment, where there is no danger of being exposed to breasts, swear words, or pirated material.
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One thing I will give to Nintendo is that they certainly had their market niche locked down very well. Those of us who grew up during the eras of the NES and SNES can certainly attest to that. Sure, maybe stomping anthropomorphic evil mushrooms and turtles qualifies a
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Performing the same biological function as billions of humans before you doesn't give you any particular insight. I'm tired of this "I'm a saint and I'm a genius, because I squirted a kid out of my crotch" bullshit.
well... (Score:4, Insightful)
This puts Google in the position of being mommy and daddy. What I consider "inappropriate" is unlikely to be the same as the next parent; what this suggests, though, is that everyone gets to deal with what Google decides, and frankly... that's not an appropriate role for a third party. That's the parent's job. If you don't have time for guiding your kids, and you can't seem to come up with rules and behaviors, or use a white-list facility competently, then perhaps you shouldn't be spawning anyway, rather than begging for a third party to do your job for you.
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And when "Google Kids" fails to filter something you consider inappropriate (either because they don't share your views, or just due to the challenges and limitations of determining and filtering content automatically) then lawsuits and bad press ensues. Bad for the Google brand all around.
In general, Google's strategy seems to be focused on providing tons of really great free, best effort services. If Gmail fails to deliver your email one day, it's not like you can sue. If Google Maps gives you wrong
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that's not an appropriate role for a third party.
it is precisely the role of a 3rd party. That's why there are rules on what can be on TV and radio stations at various hours and so on, it's why bookstores and libraries offer kids sections, it's why companies explicitly make media for children. A 3rd party should establish a brand and a trust relationship with it's customers about what sorts of content they can access through this service - whether that is an aggregation or search of content creators or creating there own.
It may not be the role of googl
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This puts Google in the position of being mommy and daddy. What I consider "inappropriate" is unlikely to be the same as the next parent;
I leave that up to Walmart, not Google!
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Fuck you.
And by the way? Isaac Newton, father of classical physics and calculus and a critical part of why this Internet exists that allow you to shovel your shit to a wide audience? No kids. So fuck you again.
And just in case you skull is as dense as your ideas: fuck you.
No, let's not fuck circletimessquare (Score:2)
Fuck you.
I wouldn't. That would just give circletimessquare more kids.
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Actually, I'm just amused by it. The irony of someone with this mindset denigrating other people as "asocial nerds"? Priceless.
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I have no biological kids. I do indeed think breeding is an error at this point in time. I have raised several, however. I have also been teaching and mentoring for decades; consequently my concerns and opinions are well distributed among younger members of society, and to the extent they have merit, are likely to continue to propagate. The fact that my genes aren't "moving forward" is of absolutely no consequence to me.
However, my attention isn't really
Kids aren't for everyone (Score:2)
families have the balance of power here, as they should, since without them, there is no future for the country
The different parts of your body have different purposes: some (the genitals) produce kids; others (the brain) produce thoughts. Likewise, the different parts of a society have different purposes: some produce kids; others produce thoughts. Humankind has the capacity for language to allow these thoughts to be communicated to the kids. This goes along with ciggieposeur's reply: Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, the fathers of the infinitesimal calculus, were in the thoughts camp rather than the kids camp.
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I'm a father of three. I am not special because I was able to bed a woman and impregnate her.
There are enough people in this world having more children than they can afford. There is no pressing need for EVERYONE to have children in order to be considered good citizens by your standards.
The reason I had children is none of your business. If I never had children, this world would still have billions of people.
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If you are in Europe or elsewhere just ignore this rant, but if you are American, please cite the section of the Constitution that elevates the status of people with kids. Otherwise you can insert your 'assertion' up your ass.
It's not in the Constitution, but it is in the US Tax Code.
Short Answer (Score:2)
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Which will happen eventually, the lulz from such an endeavor is just way too great for all trolls throughout the entire world to resist. It's pretty much a given that at least one will do so. And probably enough to make the site pointless.
Use SafeSearch (Score:5, Insightful)
Create a different user account for each of your family members, and set individual preferences. You'll want that anyway.
Multiple users on a tablet? (Score:2)
Supervise your own kid (Score:4, Insightful)
You people disgust me. You go through the trouble of having a kid and yet you want to leave the responsibilty to big corporation. If you can't bother to spend time browsing the web with your kid, don't have one.
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You seem to be of the opinion that either someone watches their kids 100% of the time or 0% of the time. Neither of those is true for any parent.
If there were to be a "safe zone" for kids, I wouldn't trust Google to do it. It certainly seems like an area that's lacking in good solutions.
Re:Supervise your own kid (Score:5, Insightful)
My parents left me alone at times. They just made sure I didn't have access to the acetylene tank (after that one little incident, anyway). Some things can be kid safe, the open Internet isn't one of them.
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You seem to be of the opinion that either someone watches their kids 100% of the time or 0% of the time.
This is slashdot. All logic is binary.
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I think you meant "appreciate", not "avoid" !
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My guess is that you were the one in 7 billion teenager that was immune to raging hormones. Take a look at daytime TV and its quite apparent that having kids isnt the hard part. Raising them is where the trouble begins
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Do you actually have kids? You obviously have no idea that a big part of parenting is letting kids explore on their own. It's our job to insure that in general, the place they are exploring is safe. So kids can hang out at the neighborhood playground, because in general there's lots of parents there who keep the baddies away. But we don't micromanage our kids.
The same way when my daughter goes to the school dance - I don't chaperone her. It's part of her life to explore. But I am secure in knowing tha
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You only get to do that if it's _your_ place. Or some place catering to kids, like an elementary school or a daycare. You don't get to child-proof the world (or the Internet), against the will of the adults who would like to live there. You certainly don't get to demand that others child-proof the world (or th
Re:Supervise your own kid (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm curious, do people who cover up outlets disgusts you? How about those who make sure there's a childproof fence around the pool? Or the ones who put a lock on the liquor cabinet?
Watching your child every second of every day is an equally dangerous proposition, in terms of their intellectual and emotional growth, as not watching them at all. They NEED to learn to think and operate independently, and being able to designate a subset of the Internet not filled with bomb instructions and donkey porn would be an excellent service to help them do that in relative safety.
Re:Supervise your own kid (Score:5, Insightful)
Comments like this always come from non-parents. True ignorance. You have no fucking idea how much harder life is when raising children. Perhaps the world should just stop reproducing so "we people" won't disgust you.
Comments like you're always come from parents who fucked their lives up and have somehow convinced themselves that their mistake actually makes them saints and sages able to dispense advice to everyone else and trump those who did not fuck their lives up. I'm not a drug addict, but I can also comment fairly astutely on addiction and the wisdom of not putting yourself in a position to potentially become one.
You are not some hero for breeding. Trust me, if you don't breed, the world will still go on. This isn't 1640, where having a healthy child that lives to the age of twelve is rare and you need to spread your seed far and wide just to hope for a chance of humanity's continuation. And my having the sense and wisdom not to have children doesn't make me selfish or unqualified to discuss parenting. (For one thing, I *HAVE* parents, just like everyone else has).
Anyway, people like me know EXACTLY HOW FUCKING MUCH HARDER LIFE IS WHEN RAISING CHILDREN. That is why we don't do it. If you insist on doing it, then just fucking do it and shut the hell up. I didn't force you to squirt one out. I didn't even ask you to. If it's so difficult or you can't afford it, then don't do it. I've somehow managed to avoid breeding as has every single person I know who doesn't want kids.
Now, that said, the idea that it's disgusting that someone wants a corporation to provide a service that helps them do that parenting is kind of absurd. Letting that company control the content your children receive entirely blindly, without having any personal insight into just what is being filtered is absurd, but as long as you know what is being filtered out or opted in and you agree with it, then what's the difference between having a service to do that or coding something to do it on your own? Or watching over your child's shoulder?
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Liability (Score:2)
Come on (Score:5, Funny)
It's already out there (Score:2)
Google Kids already exists - it's called "spending time with your kids on the computer". It works perfectly, they'll never see anything you don't want them to and as a bonus you'll develop that precious parent-child relationship.
However, it sounds like what the author really wants is a product that would be named "Google Parent", where you plonk them down in front of a computer at age three and then fifteen years later an adult magically emerges. Sadly, that's still in beta.
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It works perfectly, they'll never see anything you don't want them to
If there was ever a sentence that deserved a surreptitious goatse link, it's that one.
Although I suppose it does suggest an idea: a web browser that runs on two monitors, with a 5 second delay so that images brought up on the first monitor don't show up on the second monitor until they've been vetted on the first. (not that that sounds like "quality time with your kid" to me, but who am I to judge?)
Parents should be parents, not companies. (Score:4, Insightful)
PR nightmare waiting to happen (Score:2)
http://kids.us/ [kids.us] was a manual attempt in that direction. It seems mostly dormant.
There are so many things which can go wrong with such a service, especially if you try to automate it: You might pick up something erroneously. Domain ownership or content changes suddenly. An inappropriate advertisement is included. Google would have to be right every time, or someone will spot the mistake and unleash the hellhounds. Parents are rather nervous about what their children might potentially see on the Internet, eve
Bad analogy using libraries (Score:5, Insightful)
According to the ALA's Freedom to Read statement, librarians should not be censoring what children read, either. If a child you've dropped off at the library wants to wander into young adult or the regular adult stacks and start paging through books, the librarians should only be stepping in if the book is being mishandled. So while children's content is collected together in the children's area, the child is not prevented from accessing adult materials. You know, because the librarians aren't babysitters and are also not meant to be filters for your children the way you are, being their legal guardian and all.
Perfectly fine analogy (Score:3)
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I don't recall ever being too young to go to the library unsupervised.
And yes, Milo Manara and was there next to to Goscinny, Franquin and Herge, though I recall being a bit too embarrassed to read them at the time (this embarrassment didn't last forever, though). I also recall trying to read Sinuhe at the age of 10, though not finishing because the text was so heavy.
Anyway, I'm trying to say that not leaving your child unsupervised in the library because some words are bad and others aren't, seems insane a
Because Google isn't your babysitter. (Score:2)
Here's a suggestion (Score:3)
Crank up SafeSearch, then use OpenDNS for further filtering, and then actually supervise your kid while they use the internet and inform them of why certain things are bad/scary instead of leaving them alone to deal with it.
Don't wish for a bubble and then wonder why after leaving the bubble they just click on everything.
Plus, you're just going to have the usual issue that one community / city / state's idea of what is acceptable for kids and what is not is going to be drastically different than another community / city / state.
Not going to happen (Score:2)
Two problems with that:
#1 Age appropriate is pretty much impossible to automate. Every entry would have to be human-reviewed, and that's expensive.
#2 What you consider age-appropriate, someone else may note, and vice-versa. It's not objective, it's subjective.
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No kidding. Poor filtering algorithms lead to stuff like this:
Daddy, why does it say "cu***mber" here, instead of "cucumber" ?
Try explaining that...
Interesting (Score:2)
Not the first time this has been proposed. I know things like this have been talked about in Google, and proposed by bloggers before.
The first time I saw this proposed was here at Slashdot, circa 1999/2000. A Cnet article that proposed exactly the same thing, I believe.
I would be hard pressed to produce the article. The search function here has improved, but it's still not especially grand for finding anything old and useful.
Anyway, my guess as why it hasn't happened would be that Google is ad supported and
Parent outrage creates, parent outrage destroys (Score:2)
Why no special child-censored google? For the same reason the child-censoring market in general is so spotty: It's a fool's game.
Why? Because it's all a game of outrage. You'll never come out with a good reputation in a game of outrage, outside of a tiny community of people who rigorously train themselves to think identically.
Let's take the idea as a simple problem - filtering out the big english dirty words, then allowing a voting and challenge system to establish anything else as kid-unsafe.
The first t
Use OpenDNS (Score:2)
Their filters are not foolproof, which is impossible, but you can specify by category which things (websites) you don't want accessible on your home network.
There are other products for this purpose such as Blue Coat K9 and Net Nanny.
Looks like most folks here do not have children (Score:2)
The World is not for children..... (Score:3)
The World isn't for children and the internet is part of that world. This is a fundamental thing.
Just as you wouldn't let a child run around un-supervised in a city, you don't let them run around free on the internet. Suburbs were supposed to be a child safe environment, but ultimately they aren't either (I would argue they are about the same as cities, but thats getting off topic).
Some web sites are for kids, but to allow them on the internet they should be supervised.
The internet is not the same as TV where there is much greater control of what is coming in. The internet is all about interacting, while TV is about consuming.
There are services that promise to make the internet "safer" but I doubt they work well. I wouldn't trust them.
Re:The World is not for children..... (Score:4, Insightful)
By your logic, I shouldn't even be letting my kids outside to play because it's not "safe". Or if I do, I should be a helicopter parent, constantly hovering over them to make sure they're 100% safe 100% of the time? Even playgrounds aren't 100% safe either...they're may be sexual predators lurking in the bushes after all. Does that mean I shouldn't take my kids to them? No. It means I still watch my kids if they're in a playground, but I don't have to watch them as closely as if they're running around in a ghetto.
Being Human (Score:4, Insightful)
'Think back to when you were a kid and your parents dropped you off at the library,' explains Agger. 'In the children's section, the only "inappropriate" stuff to be found was Judy Blume's Forever, which someone's older sister had usually already checked out anyway.
This is the entirety of the issue in two simple sentences.
First is the fact that the library section is managed by humans. It is not collected programatically. It takes human intervention to select tittles for this unique collection. This is something that Google either simply does not do or tends to avoid. Google's selections are handled by infamous algorithms that, while generally effective, are not without error or immune to manipulation. It was Yahoo that, over a decade ago, hired librarians to try to catalog the web.
Secondly, even with human librarians making selections for the library's children's section, mistakes and interpretation come in to play. Is Judy Blume's Forever appropriate? All the controversy over this particular book highlights the indistinct boundaries of determining the "appropriateness" of material. And the fact that the article's author even raises the spectre of controversy over this particular book highlights the difficulty in managing even a small, distinctly controlled environment much less anything as vast and fluid as Internet content.
Here ya go (Score:2)
I'm 12 years old and what is this? (Score:2)
Being 12 year old, I find this entire discussion incredibly discriminating. It's bad enough that I'm subjected to taxation without representation, but now mandatory censorship?
I'd like to remind you adults out there that the goatex guy and goatex posters are "adults", as are most child pornographers. Maybe it's better to perform censorship on the production end by licensing and regulating the ownership of cameras.
Cultural differences (Score:4, Funny)
Billy Bob wants his son to get an early grasp on the difference between an AK-47 and a M-16 while a parent from Amsterdam might consider instructions on how to grow weed very insightful.
At the same time Fatimah hopes to teach her girl on how to become a martyr, or even worse, Gertrud and Wilhelm want their kids to be comfortable with FKK (Freikörperkultur).
You get my drift.
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Why not a funny fake name for the parent from Amsterdam? I just made up "Yohan van der Donk" and there seems to be at least one guy on the internet who's name really is that, plus it is funny.
Plus, what if Gertrud and Wilhelm's daughter is really hot, wouldn't it be lovely to have her prancing through the wold wearing nothing but a red ribbon in her long blond braids, with her parent's encouragement no less. FKK just needs stringent admission criteria, that's all.
Your Child Can Turn on The TV Anytime (Score:2)
Why Google? (Score:2)
Why should it be Google to do this?
Of course it's parents' job to supervise and make decisions for their kids, but they do delegate that to people they trust. But I'm back to: why Google?
My idea of what's appropriate for kids is very different from John Boehner's, which is different from that of Sheik Sadeq Abdallah bin Al-Majed, who would differ from the standards of that nice hippie commune on the other side of town. Google is not in a position to accommodate all of them (and the many other standards);
Bad Comparison (Score:2)
The important aspect about the library is that it is a walled garden. Anything that comes into a library is catalogues and sorted into sections. There is a specific, generally accepted criteria that defines what is children's literature. Anything that is not categorized does not get in. This classification process does not exist on the internet; nor should it. The contents of the internet is too dynamic to be able to keep such a classification accurate or up to date.
The other issue is that children do not j
The poster answer his own question (Score:2)
He considers the novel "Forever" to be harmful to children. It is a book aimed at kids to help them understand their sexuality and feelings as they grow into their teens and become young adults.
It is probably not a book a 6 year old would be intrested in but won't harm them as a 6 year old who IS interested in it and can understand the subject matter, is EXACTLY the audience. Young people curious about the emotions happening to them. Who is to say a child of few more years might not be interested? Or a you
Simple: Cannot be automatized (Score:2)
The area where Google becomes very, very incompetent is whenever you cannot automatize something completely. For example they have legal action pending against them in Switzerland for not reliably blurring out faces in streetview. Why they not just use something like the amazon mechanical turk, or give a small amount of money to anybody that reports a non-blurred face first, is beyond me.
This, however, is exactly the problem with Google: Their accuracy overall is atrocious. Normal search is often cluttered
Baidu (Score:2)
It sounds like the author's concerns are pretty similar to those the Chinese government has for all its citizens. Maybe an English language Baidu would be a good place to start.
Naive Parents (Score:2)
>'Think back to when you were a kid and your parents dropped you off at the library,' explains Agger. 'In the children's section, the only "inappropriate" stuff to be found was Judy Blume's Forever,
What a bunch of hooey.
Judy Blume was never in the Children's Section. She was in the Young Adults section. YA
Also... YA books?
Pfft.... Amateurs. Why bother when you can cruise on over to the Adult section and read the "real books"? I had my own library card at 7, the minimum age. I could check out whatev
Myth of Zero (Score:2)
Did you know that eating dirt is good for kids? Did you know that years of scrubbing hospitals of every bacteria has made them an incubator for resistent staph? It is not the occasional exposure to internet filth that alarms me as a parent. What would bother me would be my kid focusing on it and consuming it in unhealthy quantities. Building a filter to stop all exposure is lazy parenting. What you want is a relationship such that your kids, when they happen on something, talk to you about it rather
kids section of library == lame (Score:3)
Um, I think what I did was pretty quickly wander out of the kids section, because the books in that area were boring. If a kid wants to read Peter Benchley stories about sharks or eels, they will. (Er, at least that was my thing at the time. Person next to me was into knights and dragons, also not in kids section.)
Why No Google Kids? (Score:2)
Why no Google Kids? Because kids don't have any money to spend on advertised products?
Who do you think is paying? (Score:2)
As others have pointed out, Google is not a charity. Google Kids would be a lot more expensive to run than Google search (because it would need human monitoring) and they'd want money.
That means that, if they ran Google Kids, they'd want to sell things to your kids (or get your kids to pester you to buy things). Don't you get enough of that from TV?
Automation (Score:2)
Because Google is not interested in human filtering tasks, they want everything automated by computer. Since there's no way to automatically filter content without AI you're stuck.
Besides that, who decides which content is acceptable and what isn't? It just isn't going to happen. Now Yahoo or some other "portal" type would be happy to do that.
The market is tiny (Score:2)
The commercial market for net censorship is tiny. Most of the people making noise about this want the net censored for other people, not themselves. You can't sell a commercial product on that basis.
There's NetNanny [netnanny.com], which is generally considered to be mediocre at its job, but does enough to make some parents happy. Smart kids can usually bypass it. The next step up is a Christian ISP [truevine.net], where filtering takes place at the ISP end. There are a few of those, but they're really tiny.
Interestingly, there is
Why bother... (Score:2)
Sheltering kids from reality has always seemed stupid to me. It builds up a false image of the world in their eyes, just so we can idealize children as innocent. Children are what they are: selfish, thoughtless, loving, needy, playful, energetic, manipulative, and stupid, as a rule. You can replace "stupid" with "ignorant" and then with "innocent", but I find it a conceit to do so, and a harmful one. Don't add to children's ignorance just because you feel uncomfortable describing people's sexual practices a
I have a better idea (Score:2)
Stop Censorship. Censorship doesn't have shades of gray ... it's black and white. There is either free speech or there isn't. If there is free speech, you don't censor anyone, regardless of age. If there is just ONE content in the world that is banned to even a SINGLE person, then there isn't freedom of speech.
Treating kids like that is awful.
Because they can't automate it (Score:2)
Tossing out all the "be a parent" bullshit posted here since parents have to do stuff like go earn a living sometimes, the correct answer is also in some other posts. Doing this correctly requires a lot more manual intervention then "normal" Google does. You can't automate this without mistakes happening (and that's even if you discount pranksters trying to sneak adult stuff into it deliberately), and the cost of a mistake is a lot higher then it is with the safe search option.
That means they need a staff m
You Tube Comment SNOB (Score:2)
What would really be nice is some kind of (SlashDot) moderation for YouTube comments.
I'm a pretty thick skinned guy, but its far too easy to wallow around in youtube comments and get a distorted view of the world. I'm all for free speech, but the level of racism (whether earnest or trolling) , eventually is wearing. The obvious solution is not to read, but its like a car accident on the road, sometimes I look when I shouldn't! I try my best not to read comments now, and have installed YouTube comment Snob.
N
content aggregator (Score:2)
If you have any sort of programming knowledge there are a few resources on the web that detail writing simple web crawlers in $lang_du_jeur. Create your own solution that grabs content from sites you approve of and o
Re: (Score:2)
The idea of an Internet-wide search engine and a walled garden are opposing concepts. They could be made to work together, but never very well, and the costs of doing so, the limitation of thought and ideas, would outweigh the benefits (none of which I can see).
BRING BACK AOL!!!!
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, my parents would drop me off at the library, but the librarians never stopped us from going into the 'adult' section.
Of course, the 'adult' section of a public library has a very different purpose than the 'adult' section of the Internet. I'm willing to bet that your library didn't stock porn magazines, or if it did, that kids weren't allowed access to them.
COPPA (Score:2)
Doesn't youtube also have age verification?
Yes, and it uses age verification to keep children under 13 from signing up. US firms are not allowed to take personally identifying information from a child under 13, not even an e-mail address for password recovery and account deduplication, unless the parent gives permission and can prove his or her identity.