{"id":139,"date":"2010-02-24T09:19:49","date_gmt":"2010-02-24T17:19:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/internetsafety.trendmicro.com\/?p=139"},"modified":"2010-02-24T09:21:11","modified_gmt":"2010-02-24T17:21:11","slug":"youtubes-attempt-at-parental-controls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.trendmicro.com\/internet-safety\/blog\/youtubes-attempt-at-parental-controls\/","title":{"rendered":"YouTube’s Attempt at Parental Controls"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>By Lynette Owens<\/p>\n

You may not have noticed, but earlier this month YouTube made available a new feature that is intended to help users block others from viewing videos that might be inappropriate for them.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t remove any content from their site, it just keeps it off the page whenever this feature is on.\u00a0 Introducing, Safety Mode.<\/p>\n

In theory, a parent or teacher who wants to restrict kids from viewing age-inappropriate videos on YouTube from a shared browser should love Safety Mode.\u00a0 It is supposed to act much like a parental control filter like those you can find in computer security software, such as Trend Micro Internet Security.<\/p>\n

According to the instructional video<\/a> that describes how to use it, you can lock Safety Mode (by logging into your account), prevent any videos from being displayed if certain words are entered into the search box, and by default prevent comments from being displayed with any videos.<\/p>\n

So I tried it.\u00a0 On the home page, I noticed that some videos were not being displayed any longer, probably because of the content they contained.\u00a0 I selected a video and saw that the comments field had been collapsed.\u00a0 So far, so good.<\/p>\n

I then proceeded to test the blocking function based on search terms.\u00a0 I tried the ones shown in the video, and it worked as advertised.\u00a0 However, I tried other terms that might be associated with age-inappropriate content and was disappointed that it still returned search results for videos that appeared to be inappropriate (based on the still frames being displayed in the results).<\/p>\n

YouTube acknowledges that no filtering capability is perfect and requires that users still abide by their community guidelines for any content or comments posted.\u00a0 However, they might benefit from taking a cue from the companies who have been doing parental control filtering for a while and providing some control over what search terms (or categories)\u00a0they might want to add to the blocking function.<\/p>\n

Safety Mode is also browser-specific, so you need to turn it on for any browser in your home that your kids might use.\u00a0 Note: it doesn\u2019t currently work on mobile devices with internet access.<\/p>\n

YouTube\u2019s terms of service does require you to be over the age of 13 to use their site, and recommends that you do not use it if you are younger than that.\u00a0\u00a0 Kudos to YouTube for making this a requirement and acknowledging that there is a lot of content on their site that some people are just not old enough to see.<\/p>\n

But there is also a lot of good, harmless, educational and entertaining content on there, too. (My kids love the toddler who does the cover of the Beatles’ song “Hey Jude”.)\u00a0 So, given YouTube’s age restrictions and the current capabilities of its Safety Mode, it might be best for some parents to simply block access to YouTube through your security software\u2019s parental control feature or only let your kids watch YouTube under your supervision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this month YouTube made available a new feature that is intended to help users block others from viewing videos that might be inappropriate for them. It doesn\u2019t remove any content from their site, it just keeps it off the page whenever this feature is on. Introducing, Safety Mode…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-for-parents","category-for-teachers","wpautop"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trendmicro.com\/internet-safety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trendmicro.com\/internet-safety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trendmicro.com\/internet-safety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trendmicro.com\/internet-safety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trendmicro.com\/internet-safety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.trendmicro.com\/internet-safety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trendmicro.com\/internet-safety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trendmicro.com\/internet-safety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trendmicro.com\/internet-safety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}