YouTube introduces ‘Safety Mode’ for it’s 5th Birthday

It’s hard to believe that monolithic video-sharing site YouTube is only five years old, but indeed, the Google-owned site celebrated it’s 5th Birthday on 14th February 2010.

Like most ‘social networking’ or ‘social media’ sites, the openness of YouTube can be seen as very much a mixed blessing.  Whilst there is no doubt that so-called ‘user-generated’ content present on YouTube has seen a massive boon in creativity in young people, there is a darker side, where violent and explicit material can very quickly become available to all.

YouTube now serves over a million videos worldwide every day, and in 2008 it was estimated that the ‘bandwidth’ used by YouTube was more than every other site on the internet combined.  It is estimated that YouTube contains over 80 million videos, with over 150,000 added every day.

YouTube have recently announced a new feature called ‘Safety Mode’ to protect users from inappropriate videos uploaded to it’s site. 

A short video below explains how to enable 'Safety Mode' and 'lock' it so that it cannot be disabled:




We here at the Being Safe Online blog applaud YouTube’s continued efforts to keep it’s site safe for everyone to enjoy.

However, users should bear in mind that ‘blocking’ systems like this rely on content on YouTube being tagged as inappropriate in the first place.  Because YouTube provides a method for it’s users to do this, it’s one of the most efficient sites of it’s kind in terms of tagging inappropriate contact.  But no system like this is perfect, and with hundreds of thousands of videos uploaded each day, it is quite possible that (even with safety mode enabled) some inappropriate videos might be visible.  In fact, YouTube acknowledge as much in their demonstration video (above).

We believe that using monitoring software like Spysure Home Version alongside the parental controls offered by sites such as YouTube is the best way to ensure that your family remains safe online.


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