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Amazon adds kid-friendly audiobooks to FreeTime Unlimited
FreeTime Unlimited, Amazon's service that gives parents control over their kids' screen time experience, is expanding to Audiobooks. Starting today, more than 1,000 kid-friendly stories from Audible will be available through FreeTime Unlimited. The audiobooks will appear via software update. The service is available on Amazon tablets as well as iOS and Android devices.
Facebook uses machine learning to fight child exploitation
Today, Facebook's Global Head of Safety, Antigone Davis, published a blog post outlining how the social network fights child exploitation. The company uses standard industry practices, such as requiring users to be 13 years or older, using photo-matching to identify known images and reporting any violations to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
US DOT tells self-driving shuttle company to stop transporting kids
Sorry kids, neither you nor robots can be trusted. The US Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has told Transdev North America to stop hauling children around in its EZ10 Generation II autonomous shuttles in Babcock Ranch -- a community in Southwest Florida.
FDA seizes marketing documents from e-cig maker Juul
In its latest move against e-cigarettes, the US Food and Drug Administration has seized "thousands of pages of documents" from e-cig maker Juul. In a statement to CNBC, the FDA said the action was taken in order to obtain "further documentation related to Juul's sales and marketing practices, among other things." The documents were seized last week during a surprise inspection of the company's San Francisco headquarters.
Baby tooth stem cells could regrow kids' dental tissue
If you injure a tooth as a kid, there's a real chance you'll grow up with a 'dead' tooth whose roots didn't grow properly due to tissue damage. However, scientists have conducted a successful trial for a method that could regrow kids' dental tissue using stem cells from their baby teeth. The team extracted human deciduous pulp stem cells (hDPSC) from patients' healthy baby teeth, allowed the cells to reproduce in a lab culture, and implanted them in the injured teeth. A year later, enough healthy tissue had regrown that the kids could feel at least some sensations, such as hot or cold.
Amazon’s Book Box for kids is available to all US Prime members
In May, Amazon launched its Prime Book Box for kids as an invite-only program and now the company has opened it up to all US Prime members. With the subscription service, customers can get a set of books selected for their children based on their age and they can choose to have it delivered every one, two or three months. The box, which costs $23, will include either two hardback books or, for ages two and younger, four board books.
Facebook's Messenger Kids app lets children start friend requests
Facebook's Messenger Kids app has so far been strict about adding friends. Early on, it even required that children count their parents as friends. The social network is ready to loosen things up, however... if only a bit. It's giving its Android and iOS apps an optional feature that lets kids start friend requests. When you turn it on, Facebook creates a random four-word passphrase for your child -- they just have to provide that phrase to their potential Messenger Kids friend. Parents still have to approve requests, but this saves them from having to handle the entire process, and simplifies matters if they aren't friends with their young ones.
Dozens of kids hack election site replicas in just minutes
The Def Con hacker conference has been demonstrating how vulnerable voting machines are to hacks through its Voting Village, wherein adults are given the chance to compromise various models of voting devices. But this year, Def Con also let kids get in on the game, opening up replicas of states' election websites to children aged eight to 16. The event, put on by r00tz Asylum and supported by the University of Chicago and the Democratic National Committee, showed just how vulnerable these sites are to attack.
DNC-led Def Con event tests election websites against child hackers
At the Def Con hacker conference next week, the Democratic National Committee is co-sponsoring a contest that will pit child hackers against replicas of state government websites, Wired reports. Kids between the ages of eight and 16 will try to break into replicas of the websites secretaries of state use to post election results, and the one that devises the best defensive strategy will win $500 from the DNC. Another $2,000 will be awarded to whoever can penetrate a site's defenses. The University of Chicago and a non-profit called r00tz Asylum that offers cybersecurity lessons for children are also sponsoring the event.
Facebook offers educators lessons to teach kids online responsibility
It's important for all of us to stay safe and act responsibly when we're online, and that holds doubly true for young people. To help educators teach kids how to be more mindful when they use the internet, Facebook has released a batch of resources in its Digital Literacy Library. The materials guide educators in helping young people aged 11 to 18 understand issues such as privacy, reputation, security, safety and identity exploration.
UK proposal sets minimum age for drone use
The UK government could ban kids from owning drones weighing over 250g (0.55 lbs), under rules drawn up by the Department for Transport. The proposals suggest children could fly a heavier drone under adult supervision if someone older owns and has registered it. The age limit could be pegged at 18, partly because that's the minimum age for most insurance policies.
Facebook will begin actively enforcing its age policy
Facebook is tweaking its policies towards underage users, TechCrunch reports, and it will begin requiring those suspected of being younger than 13 years old to provide proof of their age. The move comes after a report from the UK's Channel 4, in which an undercover journalist began working as a Facebook content reviewer. Though Facebook and Instagram require users to be at least 13 years of age -- in order to comply with the US Child Online Privacy Protection Act -- the report revealed that in practice, those rules were often ignored. "We have to have an admission that the person is underage," a trainer told the reporter. "If not, we just pretend that we are blind and that we don't know what underage looks like."
Fundraiser to reunite immigrant families is largest in Facebook history
In the last six weeks, the Trump administration's strategy to separate children while criminally prosecuting parents for attempting to cross the southern US border illegally has led the government to take almost 2,000 youth from their families to camps and foster homes across the country. This has ignited a furor over the last week, and people have voted with their wallets. A Facebook fundraiser dedicated to reuniting these families is the largest in the social media platform's history and has raised $10.5 million to date since launching on June 16th.
Chinese school uses facial recognition to make kids pay attention
Civilian surveillance in China has seen a boom in recent times, with facial recognition leading the charge in the technologies used to keep tabs on the population. Police are scanning travelers with facial recognition glasses, authorities are using the tech to monitor ethnic minorities -- now the Orwellian technology has a new target: kids. According to government-run Chinese website Hangzhou.com, a school has installed facial recognition technology to monitor how attentive students are in class.
Alexa becomes a playtime storyteller for Lego Duplo blocks
It's not just Amazon setting out to make Alexa kid-friendly. Lego has unveiled an Alexa story skill that guides younger children (aged 2 to 5) through playtime with Duplo blocks. Kids and their parents can walk through customizable stories themed around animals or vehicles with Amazon's voice assistant encouraging "constructive, exploratory and roleplay" experiences. It can ask them to build creatively and recognize colors, for example.
Amazon wants Prime Book Box to be your kid's summer reading companion
Amazon is a little late to the (non-food) subscription box fad, but that won't stop it from shipping children's books to your door. Prime Book Box Kids is targeted at parents, and will deliver either a pair of hardcover books or a quartet of board books on a regular basis. There are four age ranges to choose from, with appropriate titles available for infants all the way up to tweens.
Verizon adds location tracking to its parental control app
Verizon announced today that it's revamping its parental controls, introducing more capabilities and giving the app a new look. What was known as FamilyBase will now be called Verizon Smart Family and it lets parents set content filters, manage screen time, pause internet access, check the battery status of their kids' phones and get a summary of their children's call and text history. Among the new tools are the ability to block certain apps and location tracking, which can provide alerts when a child enters a predetermined area, like when they come home or get to school, for example.
Study finds over 3,300 Android apps improperly tracking kids
There's little doubt that mobile apps sometimes overstep their bounds by collecting more data from kids than the law allows. But how often does that happen? It might be more than you think. Researchers using an automated testing process have discovered that 3,337 family- and child-oriented Android apps on Google Play were improperly collecting kids' data, potentially putting them in violation of the US' COPPA law (which limits data collection for kids under 13). Only a small number were particularly glaring violations, but many apps exhibited behavior that could easily be seen as questionable.
YouTube is still plagued with disturbing kids' videos
There's a section of supposedly kid-friendly YouTube that's rife with odd and often disturbing videos. But though YouTube began actively addressing the issue last year, there still appears to be a problem. Just a few days ago, Business Insider reported that the YouTube Kids app was suggesting conspiracy theory videos and now Wired reports that there's still quite a bit of strange, deeply troubling content out there geared towards children.
YouTube's Kids app suggested conspiracy theory videos
As much work as YouTube may have done to scrub vile videos from its Kids app, there's still some work to go. Business Insider has discovered that the Kids app was suggesting conspiracy theory videos when you searched for certain keywords. If you looked for "UFO," for instance, you'd find videos from David Icke parroting numerous discredited conspiracy theories, including the notion that the planet is run by reptile-human hybrids.
