Google plans to create specific versions of its most popular products with children – more specifically those aged 12 or younger – in mind, Pavni Diwanji told USA Today in an interview. Diwanji, vice president of Engineering at Google, has been charged to lead the new initiative.
Google processes over 40,000 search queries every second, Diwanji said, and some of these are surely initiated by children. The tools offered by Google were – until now – aimed at adults, helping them do their jobs and generally be much more productive. This changes a bit starting next year, when the search giant starts rolling out its re-vamped products focusing on kids. The most likely to be “kid-friendlied” first are the products already popular among children, like Search, YouTube and Chrome. Diwanji, mother of two, expects the move to be controversial at first, but reminds us that these products are already accessible to our children at school and at home. The aim is to make these products fun and safe for children.
Google offered no timetable about the rollout at this time, but promised to dedicate the time necessary for it to be worth the wait. “We want to be thoughtful about what we do”, Diwanji said, “giving parents the right tools to oversee their kids’ use of our products”. She noted that Google wants the kids to be safe and helping them become something more than just “pure consumers of tech”.
As Google expected, the plan is already controversial. The FTC has fined companies mining children’s data a number of times in the last decade and a half, including Yelp, which failed to implement a functional age check into its rating app. There are concerns about the services’ ads aimed on kids as well, through voice-based ads targeted on an age group susceptible to manipulation. Still, I don’t really understand how this is different from the commercials airing non stop on the cartoon TV channels of the world.