Like Apple, Google Cares about Children
August 25, 2021
My question, “Why are large technology companies demonstrating a new interest in protecting children?” PR maybe? Impending regulation? A realization that their days of carefree unregulated behavior are coming to a close? I sure don’t know.
Well this took longer than it should have. What an innovation after 20 plus years… protecting children. BBC News reports, “Google Lets Parents Remove Children from Image-Search Results.” We learn:
“Parents will now be able to have images of their children removed from Google search results, the company has said. It came as Google announced a range of changes to child-safety measures across several of its products. It will also remove ‘overly commercial content’ from the children’s version of YouTube and change what kind of adverts can be targeted at under-18s. Several major technology companies have introduced such measures under scrutiny from governments and safety advocates.”
Ah, so the move was in response to pressure, not out of the goodness of Google’s conscience. What a surprise. The write-up notes Facebook-owned Instagram has made accounts of those under 16 private by default (they weren’t already?!) in an effort to placate critics of its plan to launch a children’s version.
Googley concessions within YouTube Kids include turning off autoplay as the default and removing “overly” commercial content. As for Google Search, in addition to the ability to remove children’s images from results, the company is making the following changes:
- Stopping ad targeting based on children’s age, gender or interests
- Preventing ‘age sensitive’ types of adverts being shown to younger users
- Changing the default mode for uploaded videos, for children, to ‘the most private option’
- Turning adult-filtering mode Safe Search on for minors
- Preventing young people from using Location History, the feature that tracks and logs a phone’s location constantly
- Adding new parental advice on the Google Play app store”
These measures seem like common sense, and one wonders if such fences should have been erected and maintained years, decades ago. Better late than never, we suppose. The article points out, though, that many kids lie about their age when they venture online. Are age verification measures, like the ones used for online sales of cigarettes and booze, on the way? They may be, at least in the UK, if that nation’s Online Safety Bill passes.
Apple and Google care about kids.
Cynthia Murrell, August 25, 2021
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