Kiddle: Your child’s new Google?
Has someone found a way for your child to search safely online? You decide.
Kiddle is the supposed complete solution to parents who always stress that their children might find, or might even be searching for, inappropriate content online.
For years and years, parents have been in combat with the big bad evil that is the world-wide web. What is my child looking at? How can I know? Is he or she finding inappropriate information while doing research for school?
The fact of the matter is near-anything these days can be searched for online, most popularly through the search engine giant, Google. Recently, an unknown company launched Kiddle. It was registered in 2014 and is not run by or affiliated to Google, but is powered by Google’s safe searches.
How does it work? By introducing one’s child to Kiddle’s home page as their very own ‘Google’, they can search for anything they’d like. Inappropriate results are automatically filtered out by Kiddle’s editors and Google’s safe search, and what they find is then a supposed child-friendly version of information. Should they search for an inappropriate term, a message will pop up explaining explicit content will not be showcased and blocking results for it.
As an added bonus parents can also request that additional key words or websites be blocked by Kiddle’s editors.
It is, however, not without its problems and controversies. The BBC earlier this year pointed out that certain controversial keywords are blocked while others are not, and the LGBT community’s results in its entirety is blocked by Kiddle, as “it is hard to guarantee the safety of all the search results for such a query”, this according to Kiddle’s pop-up message.
BBC pointed out terms such as lesbian and gay, circumcision, suicide and even Pamela Anderson are blocked on Kiddle, but terms like female genital mutilation (FGM), self-harm and Fifty Shades of Grey are searchable and will yield results.
Is Kiddle child-friendly and unbiased, in your opinion? Let us know via email to mathildem@caxton.co.za
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