“We want kids to be safe, but ultimately it’s about helping them be more than just pure consumers of tech, but creators, too.” [Pavni Diwanji. Google vice president of engineering].

Google is developing child-friendly versions of its biggest services, which is expected to include search, Chrome YouTube and Gmail.

“We expect this to be controversial, but the simple truth is kids already have the technology in schools and at home. So the better approach is to simply see to it that the tech is used in a better way.”

Google processes 40,000 search queries a second, or 1.2 trillion a year. That’s a lot of ways that search can lead kids to places where they shouldn’t be.

It is not yet prepared to confirm exactly what will be made child-friendly, nor when. Google has already developed a number of child-oriented programs – virtual Maker Camp, Doodle 4 Google competition and Made with Code initiative. Made with Code was illuminated the lights of White House Christmas trees this year, based on coding programs created by children in the US.

“The big motivator inside the company is everyone is having kids, so there’s a push to change our products to be fun and safe for children,” Diwanji insisted.

The new versions will go further than existing safe search tools already available (Google has Safe Search for Kids). She cited the example that when her own child Googled “trains”, she received a list of Amtrak train schedules instead of Thomas the Tank Engine responses. The new child-friendly versions will include tools that let parents monitor and manage how much time their kids spend online and where they go.

“We want to enable supervision but not be regimental. But that’s challenging because no two parents are alike. I have friends who are helicopter parents and others are even more liberal than me, but everyone has to be accommodated by whatever we create,” Diwanji noted.

Of course, the possibility that marketers will be able to push the limits of what they are allowed to do has not gone unnoticed. “The prospect of audio-based advertising targeting our children is very real, and that’s significant when you’re talking about an age group that is very susceptible to manipulation. The FTC will have to step up on this. I don’t think we want a world where our kids are sold things they don’t need,” commented Marc Rotenberg, president of the watchdog group, Electronic Privacy Information Center.

 The FTC’s (The Federal Trade Commission’s) Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) has already imposed fines against 20 companies in 15 years for mining young user information without parental consent. COPPA has been updated a number of times in the past decade to reflect the growth of tech trends, most notably to include provisions for everything from geolocation data collected from mobile devices to photo- and voice-uploading protocols on social networking sites.