
YouTube is without a doubt one of the weirdest and wildest places on the web. Whether you’re looking for cartoons from the 1980s, crazy cat videos, or teenagers making homemade explosives, a quick perusal of YouTube will usually get you what you need. Of course, not everyone thinks that the wide world of web video should be so easily accessible. That’s why YouTube recently unveiled a new feature called “Safety Mode.”
According to the official YouTube Blog, Safety Mode can be turned on by scrolling to the bottom of any YouTube page. Once there, you will see the words “Safety Mode is Off.” Clicking on the text will allow you to turn the Safety Mode on for the remainder of your browser session. To keep Safety Mode in place on a more permanent basis, you have to log-in to your Google account. The following video explains the process in greater detail.
On its surface, the YouTube Safety Mode sounds good. Giving parents an easy tool to help filter what their kids find online is a smart move, and one that can help Google answer some of its critics in the government. However, when it comes to implementation, the Safety Mode falls short.
As explained in this article from ReadWriteWeb,
“the new ‘Safety Mode’ does little to prevent kids from seeing the content parents want to hide. Although once on it does a reasonably good job at filtering YouTube’s vast array of material, it’s only a button-click away from being turned off again. And if you think your kids can’t find the button in need of clicking then you just don’t know kids very well. If anything, today’s youngest generation of Internet users are more tech-savvy than their parents, often having to help mom and dad navigate around the Web, not the other way around.”
Even if a parent does log on to their Google account, to make the Safety Mode permanent, what’s stopping a child from logging onto the same account and undoing the setting. You could argue that a child may not know a parent’s password to Google, but that would assume that the parent logs out of Google every time he or she gets up from the computer. If you’re like me, you probably don’t log in and out of your Gmail account, you just have it open all day.
Furthermore, this assumes that a child YouTube user doesn’t have access to their own Google log-in. As the RWW article says, kids these days are extremely efficient web users. For YouTube to really limit access to inappropriate material, they would probably have to institute some heavier changes, which I’m sure kids would still be able to access given enough time and inclination.
The only truly effective form of “parental control” is actual parental control. As we shared in our article on Common Sense Social Networking Rules for Kids, the key to protecting kids online doesn’t lie solely in a software program, but in a parent’s commitment to establish reasonable rules about Internet use and fostering an open environment for education.


