As MiniG-T gets older he’s been starting to use our computers at home more and is considerably more comfortable surfing the internet. We tend to think we’re quite responsible parents and so have set him up with his own user profile which has parental controls set for times he can use it, how long he can spend on and, probably most importantly, internet access locked down.
The computer also stays in the lounge where adult(s) are present so we can keep an eye on what he’s up to.
You can imagine my surprise when this week he asked about a YouTube video that had come up with the question “Is This Child Abuse?” as a title.
It turns out that to limit childrens’ access to YouTube you have to sign up for a Google account or you have to set the Safety setting to ‘On’ every time your child goes to the website. I have a google account so did the necessary with each of the three browsers on my laptop that he sometimes uses. In view of the default ‘Off’ setting I thought I’d just test out the settings.
On the home page there was highlighted an excerpt from Black Mirror, with the following summary:
Catch Up on the Latest TV
This week… Charlie Brooker’s blackly comic ‘Black Mirror’ premieres to much acclaim (and horror!) in the first ep ‘The National Anthem’;
Safe for children? I don’t think so.
Clicking the link brings up the following screen:
I took the laptop to MiniG-T and asked him, “If you saw this, what would you click?”
It took four goes and some encouragement to read all the text before he finally worked out what he should click.
Personally I don’t think this is good enough. At the very least, the ‘yes I’m 18′ button should be swapped with the ‘cancel’ hyperlink to save younger children from seeing images that they shouldn’t see.
What do you think?
