Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Locking SafeSearch

Google has added a “Lock SafeSearch” feature, available via their search preferences page. It’s meant for concerned adults who don’t want kids to switch away from the SafeSearch filtering (SafeSearch prevents certain adult content from entering web or image results). Once you enable the lock, Google-colored balls as pictured above will appear stamped on the page, meant to be seen by adults from further away – not even logging out will get rid of them. Once cookies are deleted though the lock is gone (and it’s always possibe to switch to another search engine, like Microsoft Bing).

A technical side effect to all this is that now, logging out is not always a clean separation anymore – e.g. if another person signs in to their own account after you’ve activated the lock and signed out, they will still find your email address on their preferences page (it will read e.g. “SafeSearch is currently locked. If you are philipp.lenssen@gmail.com, you can unlock or verify this preference.”)

[Thanks Hebbet!]

Locking SafeSearch by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (1+5)

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