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Google Education United States Technology

Google Is Teaching Children How To Act Online. Is It the Best Role Model? (nytimes.com) 96

Posted by msmash from the hold-your-horses dept.
Google is positioning itself in schools as a trusted authority on digital citizenship at a moment when the company's data-handling practices are under growing scrutiny. From a report: Google is on a mission to teach children how to be safe online. That is the message behind "Be Internet Awesome," a so-called digital-citizenship education program that the technology giant developed for schools. The lessons include a cartoon game branded with Google's logo and blue, red, yellow and green color palette. The game is meant to help students from third grade through sixth guard against schemers, hackers and other bad actors. Google plans to reach five million schoolchildren with the program this year and has teamed up with the National Parent Teacher Association to offer related workshops to parents. But critics say the company's recent woes -- including revelations that it was developing a censored version of its search engine for the Chinese market and had tracked the whereabouts of users who had explicitly turned off their location history -- should disqualify Google from promoting itself in schools as a model of proper digital conduct.
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Google Is Teaching Children How To Act Online. Is It the Best Role Model? More

Google Is Teaching Children How To Act Online. Is It the Best Role Model?

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  • Don't be Evil (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tulsa_Time ( 2430696 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2018 @10:35AM (#57529641)

    Too late...

    Google motto 2004: Don’t be evil
    Google motto 2010: Evil is tricky to define
    Google motto 2013: We make military robots... also, we help Hillary overthrow governments and help the Chinese oppress their people
    Google motto 2017: Trump is evil
    Google motto 2018: We do not care what you think, we are Evil, deal with it.

  • Dont worry citizen (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The corporation shall educate your child accordingly

    • It is cheaper to educate kids to browse safely then program in such safeguards into your product.
      Also the Tech Industry moves much faster then the Education System. Most elementary school teachers in terms of technology teaching are often already behind their kids skill levels.

  • Sure. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 24, 2018 @10:37AM (#57529655)

    Listen - I won't argue that Google hasn't left behind something important with its "Don't be evil" philosophy.

    But compared to 'adult' power morality in our nation, Google is still relatively saintly.

    Our latest answer to violence is crueler violence - our adults are failing the most basic tests of civilization just to see their opponents squirm and laugh at it.

    I think the kids are the sanest folks left, given the studies I've seen on how they're handling all this - and Google is one of the least horrible influences.

    • Re:Sure. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dcw3 ( 649211 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2018 @11:39AM (#57530161) Journal

      No, just because you've read about a few jackasses in the news, tv or interweb, doesn't make it the norm for the vast majority of parents. Those are all busy catching eyeballs to increase revenue with the latest train wreck...it's just not reality. Why do you think we hear stories about some beautiful young getting killed or kidnapped, for weeks, and yet every single day there are multiple murders across the entire country. It's because they're not interested in reporting the actual news, they just want your attention to sell ads.

  • How to Be Safe Online (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Trust Google.

    Google is there to keep you safe.

    Use Google Products.

    Give All your Data To Google.

    Google Will Keep It Safe.

    Sincerely,

    Google for Kids

  • No, parents should be handling that (Score:5, Insightful)

    by KixWooder ( 5232441 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2018 @10:39AM (#57529677)
    Except at the current, neither is,otherwise you wouldn't have the likes of 4chan and reddit, where you say one thing and you called a cuck and doxed.

    Finally someone snaps does real harm or causes harm to themselves. Thoughts and prayers abound and suicide prevention hotlines are posted, when it wouldn't be needed if people were just nicer to one another online and in real life.

  • Other version already exist (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bob the Super Hamste ( 1152367 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2018 @10:42AM (#57529693) Homepage
    Other non google versions exist. I know that the Boy Scouts has a program for this [netsmartz.org] through a partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. It is also requirement at least at that cub scout level. I also know that my kids public school district uses the Scouts's program in their elementary school as it is available for anyone to use.
    • So does the boy scouts program indoctrinate kids that they should harass, belittle, and ostracize homosexuals, or does BSA only do that in the real world?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

      The NetSmartz program is childish and painfully out-of-date. My 3rd-grade scout had to watch a video where kids and robots singing about netiquette, that looks like it is based on the days of AOL chat rooms. It's totally inaccessible to any child. It doesn't talk about text messages, online games, or web sites. It treats the internet like some giant chatroom where saying mean things makes people turn smelly and singing a song fixes it. The stuff they put for Grades 6-8 should be for Grade 2. Once a ch

  • Corporations (Score:3)

    by DaMattster ( 977781 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2018 @10:54AM (#57529807)
    Corporations are not the best role models at all. Period. They do underhanded and devious things all of the time so the last entity that I want teaching my child about morals is a fucking corporation.
  • Unless you want your child to grow into a greedy fuckhead that has no respect for other people.

  • Deal with the things that are practical. (Score:3)

    by shess ( 31691 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2018 @11:01AM (#57529873) Homepage

    You _can_ use better passwords, you _can_ be more careful with your social graph, these things are relatively simple to get right enough for most people. They are mostly geared towards protecting you from third-party activity which has not taken control of the infrastructure of the products you are using.

    Yes, you could teach sixth graders about changing settings and using DuckDuckGo, but realistically the problem isn't the search engine or browser you use, it's the products you use. Yes, using Google for a search engine could expose various things to Google - but it's all the sites you go to that are strip-mining your information and selling it to each other, they don't need Google to do that. If you're using Facebook, then switching from Google to DuckDuckGo isn't helping you much. Likewise if you're using Amazon or YouTube or any other site. You're up against adversaries who control the horizontal and the vertical, there's not a lot you can do which isn't comparable to using crystals or magnets to address your arthritis. Hell, millions of people install malware-protection programs which turn out to be actual malware! THEY PAY FOR IT! We simply aren't equipped to effectively deal with this scale of issue at an individual level.

    I think Google has good incentives to help teach you, the individual end-user, to avoid scams perpetrated by other individual end users (nigerian prince, identity theft), and also against organized and opportunistic data-collectors (black market trading in password databases types of things). And those are issues you actually can improve based on your actions. But protecting yourself from having Google or MasterCard or Target "steal" your privacy is a tough problem, individuals can only really solve it by opting out, or supporting regulatory changes.

  • Nothing but Ad Hominem Fallacy!!! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This is nothing but a good example of classic Ad Hominem logical fallacy/attack!!!

    The real issue to consider is this: Is the training content provided by Google is right or wrong?
    Tell us about that!!!

    The real issue is NOT whether Google itself is a good role model or not!!!

    • This is nothing but a good example of classic Ad Hominem logical fallacy/attack!!!

      The real issue to consider is this: Is the training content provided by Google is right or wrong?
      Tell us about that!!!

      The real issue is NOT whether Google itself is a good role model or not!!!

      So, what you're saying is, we should judge the Nazis who ran the Hitler Youth program based on their success/failure rate, and never consider the fact that they were goddamned Nazis?

      Oookay...

  • If you can't be bothered to spend enough time raising your own children, then do not have them in the first place. You should not be allowing the TV, the Internet, Google, or anyone other than yourselves, and maybe close relatives, to raise your children.

    • If you can't be bothered to spend enough time raising your own children, then do not have them in the first place.

      Not that I disagree (much the opposite), but since we're talking about Google getting into schools, and the fact that sending your kids to school is mandatory, I don't think that really applies here.

      • If what you're really telling me is that you actually believe you have no say in how your kids' school teaches them, then I must say you're doing it wrong. At the very least you can counter-act the Google 'programming' they're being indoctrinated with in any way you can.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • You can't be 'Internet Awesome', Google tells children on their 'Certificates of Internet Awesomeness' [nyt.com], unless 'You know how to tell the difference between the real and the fake.' By that standard, Google itself is not 'Internet Awesome.' From Tuesday's Google Online Security Blog post [googleblog.com]: "Last week, BuzzFeed News provided us with information that helped us identify new aspects of an ad fraud operation across apps and websites that were monetizing with numerous ad platforms, including Google [buzzfeednews.com]. While our intern

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Who Else Is There? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Are parents stepping up to handle this? Schools? Local governments? If not Google, or some other corporation, who else is attempting to fill this role? Google may objectively be the worst possible choice for this particular role, but they also seem to be the only choice.

  • Why complain about something positive? (Score:3)

    by Targon ( 17348 ) on Wednesday October 24, 2018 @01:37PM (#57530921)

    While people can complain about how corporations may act behind the scenes, there is a huge problem right now with people who fall for what most of us might consider an obvious scam. Phishing attacks, phone calls "from Microsoft", and "Your computer is sending out viruses, let us come in and we will fix it for you" type things are becoming increasingly common. If Google is going to do a good thing and teach kids not to fall for these types of scams, is that REALLY a bad thing? We are not talking about classes talking about corporate ethics, we are talking about some pretty straight forward stuff that kids SHOULD be taught from an early age.

  • get into education?
    To spread its own domestic party political politics? For the ads?

  • Considering how badly some parents handle their kids (or in some cases not at all) then Google might actually do a better job there. Google's already everywhere on the Internet almost. The only way to avoid Google is to go to their competitors which are probably doing the exact same things or worse. It's in Google's best interests to ensure our kids have a good experience from the Internet and not a tragic or bad one.

  • Does it teach kids how to log off their Android phone?

    Your phone still works, with a few awkward workarounds*, if you log out of your Google account and keep using it.

    (*some are really awkward, actually. If you log out of your phone, your 'contacts' disappear. The workaround is to export your Contacts to a vcard file and then read that Vcard file back into your 'contacts list' after you've logged out of Google.)

    Kids can also learn how to make sure they are logged out of Google on their browser. And how

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