Google Eyes Kid-Friendly Accounts For YouTube, Gmail

I don't know, kid-friendly accounts for YouTube and Gmail seems like a pretty good idea. What do you think?

The Web giant is reportedly working on versions of YouTube and Gmail that are specifically geared towards children. If Google goes through with the plan, it would be the first time the company has offered accounts to children under 13 years old, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed people familiar with Google's plans.

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Oh, good ideas almost always end up failing miserably....

Someone can now target all children under 13... that cannot be good.

Data mine the kids before they grow up

Brilliant!

It's hard to take Google seriously these days when they put forth such a service without consideration of kids. I swear their current day motto should be "Be stupid" instead of "Do no evil".

Google's name will be mud when the pedo's show up for this.

This is nothing more than a push to expand the number of people they can shove bullshit advertisements to. They have already exhausted these methods (they track every click you make and scan email text replacing words with adwords) on adults.

By making "children age" accounts available they are making people do the work of sorting that demographic for them. So they save that expense and on top get to profit by shoving targeted ads to those accounts. The rabble of mainstream internet sheeple will lap it up, just watch.

And so begins the exploration of the last, great, untapped consumer base...

Data-mine and advertise to them young when they're even easier to condition and program into future mindless drones.

Brilliant plan, if not insidiously evil too. Should be barred by law, but it won't be when the government can benefit from it just as much as Google.

how bout the put a video child filter on youtube. 90% of the videos i have watched in the last few weeks have the f bomb in them. Makes me mad my son cant watch a tutorial for minecraft without hearing profanity

Just look at the idiot in the comments section, complaining about how his 4-year-old may see offensive content on YouTube. So why the fuck are you letting a 4-year-old use YouTube, retard?

Good old parenting can take care of most of these issues, Google or not.

Can't come soon enough - it's not like kids don't already use them.

I have a "Google Apps for your Domain". Meaning my domain is hosted by Google. My domain's email is a "custom Gmail," and I have all the usual Google services available to logins at my domain. (There were stupid pains when G+ came out - it LOOKED like it was using my custom domain, but it wasn't, so then they allowed from the custom domain, and we had to go through hoops to get the two merged.)

So I created an email address for my daughter. She was under 2 years old at the time. She didn't start seriously using it until she was over 5, of course. She's now 9. She wanted to make "Minecraft 'watch me play'" videos. Sure, that sounds fine. So we linked her Google Apps account to a new YouTube account, with an alias.

A couple months later, her email stopped working. I logged in, and saw "your account is linked to a service that requires you to be 13 or older - Google will delete your account in one month unless you provide proof that you are over 13."

Note: This was an account on my hosted domain. This wasn't an @gmail. I as the administrator was not given any notice of this, wasn't given any means to rectify it. Her account was completely disabled. No Google services would work with it. There was no way for me as the administrator to access her account. (To access her existing email messages, for example.) We had *JUST* (the day before) sent email invitations for her 10th birthday party - using her email address as the RSVP.

Google wouldn't let me remove the "age-limited" services (aka: I couldn't just delete her YouTube account,) it wouldn't let me do ANYTHING other than "prove you are 13 or older," logging in as her own account. So I had to lie to Google, claiming that she was 13 by paying $1.00 by credit card. (How having a credit card proves you are *13*, I don't know...) The other method would have meant emailing or snail mailing a scan/photocopy of an ID showing name and birth date - which obviously wouldn't work.

Now, I would have happily just told her "sorry, no YouTube account" and disabled YouTube. But they didn't give me - the domain administrator - the choice. They blanked shut her account down, and said "prove you're 13+ or we're deleting all your data in a month."

This was last month. I've been researching alternate ways to host my domain since.

But all that said, it would be nice if I could just grant her "kid access" to the otherwise-age-limited services. Because she still wants to make YouTube videos. (And there are plenty of videos by kids who are obviously under 13...)

deathhorse said:

how bout the put a video child filter on youtube. 90% of the videos i have watched in the last few weeks have the f bomb in them. Makes me mad my son cant watch a tutorial for minecraft without hearing profanity

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Or you can teach your kid about proper language use - how different methods of speaking have different audiences. My daughter knows that some people use "colorful language", and that such language may be acceptable in some situations (among friends,) but NOT acceptable in others (among non-peers, such as around teachers/coaches/parents/etc.)

DF-1 said:

Data mine the kids before they grow up

Brilliant!

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Thankfully, many laws prevent data mining of kids under 13. That's why 13 is the usual cutoff. Many other services allow under-13, but make you opt for "<13" so they know not to data mine that account.

WhiskeyTangoFoxtrot said:

And so begins the exploration of the last, great, untapped consumer base....

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Have you never seen toy or cereal advertising? That consumer base is far from "untapped"...

Sounds good for use with Chromebooks in schools.

They need it because right now everyone is lying about their kids age to get them gmail accounts. But then because google tries to force people to be part of google plus parents are getting all sorts of unintended extras they don't want. Same with auto signing them into youtube. MS is so far ahead of google on this front.

i think it is needed, given that so many kids will use things that require at least an email addy.


however it still is creepy when a 13 year old is forced into a google plus account upon getting email.

CharonPDX said:

Or you can teach your kid about proper language use - how different methods of speaking have different audiences. My daughter knows that some people use "colorful language", and that such language may be acceptable in some situations (among friends,) but NOT acceptable in others (among non-peers, such as around teachers/coaches/parents/etc.)

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Sadly most parents don't teach their kids this. Most parents just flat out say cussing is evil; then cuss around their kids. Then the kids start cussing when they aren't supposed to (around coaches, whatever) because the parents didn't teach them correctly.

CharonPDX said:

Thankfully, many laws prevent data mining of kids under 13. That's why 13 is the usual cutoff. Many other services allow under-13, but make you opt for "<13" so they know not to data mine that account.

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I don't think that's true. A company might not be able to sell data it collects that pertains to the less than 13 crowd, but that doesn't mean it can't collect it, save it, and use it internally. If it wasn't possible to do that, Ganz would have like some super serious problems with Webkinz and Amazing World.

And besides, if Google offers a service, it's pretty much a sure thing that the company is gathering vast quantities of data about user activity, storing it for years, and mining it for information to monetize it.

All that collected stuff will be useful to Google later when it can associate it with the person as they become and adult and are already comfy with Google knowing basics. It can then be linked to Chrome browser and Android phone data later in life giving the company a much more complete psychological profile including early childhood development that they're currently missing in their attempt to monetize human life.

cdr_74_premium said:

Good old parenting can take care of most of these issues, Google or not.

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exactly. Even then , the idea of a kid friendly account is interesting.

Children should be leashed and kenneled until age 14 and have no business on the internet, at which point they should be evaluated and the top 80% scoring pass initiation into adulthood, and can have full on gmail and youtube priveleges. The remaining 20% get used for crash testing and on pharmaceutical safety before being recycled into gradeschool lunch meat. Seems fair to me anyway.

Ducman69 said:

Children should be leashed and kenneled until age 14 and have no business on the internet, at which point they should be evaluated and the top 80% scoring pass initiation into adulthood, and can have full on gmail and youtube priveleges. The remaining 20% get used for crash testing and on pharmaceutical safety before being recycled into gradeschool lunch meat. Seems fair to me anyway.

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This is done already, except the ratio is just the top 1% ppasses, the remaining 99% are considered cattle and expendable.

Netflix does this. Google can easily do this with their YouTube movie and television channels which are rated, but everyday videos will be much harder to monitor.