YouTube Safety Feature A Wonderful Fix, With a Fatal Flaw
This past weekend YouTube rolled out a rather impressive security feature, acknowledging that much of the content on the site is not exactly family-friendly.
The immensely popular video-sharing network is owned and operated by Google, and Safety Mode is similar to the “safe-search” we know from their search engine. In its blog post on the new feature, Google acknowledges that the filter is not 100% effective, but that it is a step towards a more user-controlled experience.
I tested Safety Mode when it rolled out and I have to say that Google has done a truly admirable job in making it easy and effective. Once I locked in Safety Mode it was effective in preventing me from viewing questionable content. There are two things that will trip up concerned parents, though, one small and the other fairly major: first, to lock in Safety Mode parents must have a YouTube account or Google account, something a lot of parents don’t have; and second, it only works on a per browser basis.
The account requirement is minor, as anyone can set up an account in minutes, but the browser thing is big and why a lot of parents will likely choose to stay with filtering software that can universally block harmful YouTube content across all major browsers. While it was nearly impossible for me to turn off Safety Mode in Firefox after I had locked it in using my YouTube account (even after signing out, clearing cookies, and creating a dummy test account), all I had to do was fire up Safari or any other browser to get right back to the objectionable content. This is a big deal for lots of reasons:
- Kids who are looking at things online that they don’t want their parents to know about are very likely to use a different browser
- Downloading any new browser is free and easy, so even deleting other browsers from your system is only a temporary fix
- Chances are your average ten-year-old knows a few cookie clearing tricks that I don’t
So while Google’s efforts to provide parents with one way of controlling content are a huge step forward in both acknowledging the problem and dealing with it, parents need to be aware of the inherent limitations of this kind of filtering.
Filed under: Internet Safety News
That’s one of the things I love most about SafeEyes – that it works on all browsers on the computer. There is a lot of talk about protecting children around here but in my household it’s just my husband and I and it’s him that asked me to set up web content filters. I used to have a filter set up on Firefox (a free add-on kind of thing) but he admitted that the temptation to download another browser was a problem. SafeEyes has been great for us!
Does the new YouTube filter work for Mac? On the previous version of SafeEyes it was only for PC. I was pretty disappointed when I found that out since YouTube has been a problem for us in the past.
If you are worried about browser-switching, then safeeyes isn’t a full solution either: All it does is force the user to go to the extra trouble of downloading and burning a linux liveCD.
I am glad that google and youtube take steps to show us that they care about the content that they are putting out. The more we can get them on the side of the family, the more support they will have from me!
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