🤔 Google thinks its a parent now

and unfortunately they may be right

August 29, 2025

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
― James Baldwin.

In today’s newsletter:

Google thinks its a parent now
Cloudflare wants to help you make AI pay
Creepy or not: The Prompt Theory

Pense

This week we mourn the life of a young man who was guided on how to commit suicide by ChatGPT. And unfortunately, he won't be the last.

You may not know this, but there are groups developing AI towards being a friend or even a ‘god’. All seeing. All knowing. All helpful. But as a piece of code that only predicts the next best thing to say, unfortunately, it is a tool that doesn’t have discernment.

And now that we face the loneliest generation in known history, parents must realize that the previous method of living and raising children must change.

If not, tech companies and the government will happily step in to parent for you.

And that’s what’s happening now.

Google is now going to use predictive AI models to determine your age which will further determine what content you will get to see on its platforms. This is an attempt to protect the younger generation from the darker parts of the internet.

This has been an issue since the creation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule ("COPPA") in 2000. It was created to regulate the data that is collected from children on the internet who are under the age of 13 in the USA. But until recently, its been fairly hard to know who was underage without a formal government issued id. So, it was really up to parents to be actively involved in their children’s lives to ensure safe use.

That hasn’t been working out to well. In 2018, Peppa Pig parody videos had the favored children’s character killing other characters. Many blamed the platform for not have proper child safety protections. I blame the parents. Now, I’m not a parent, but I am an aunt. And my brother is a single dad. I was told what they can watch, where they can watch it, given a stack of approved DVDs, and warned to not let them watch anything that I haven’t seen before. And I do my best to respect that. ( And I have failed a few quite times). But he’s point, is basically, don’t let his children watch anything unsupervised.

Which brings us to where we are now, many parents aren’t buying child safe phones. Many aren’t turning off the internet or have firewalls set up. They blame their children for being too tech savvy instead of doing what it takes to keep up.

So, governments across the world want big tech to step in. But now my question is, will predicting age actually contribute to thought censorship? What protections are there to ensure that actually adults still get full access to all content on Google Platforms? And on the flip side, will young adults be any better off when the safeguards come off. Will they have learned the care and discipline of using the internet that they parents should be teaching them? Are we like going to see internet education courses that cause politically divided debates?

I don’t know. And I don’t have the answers. But I do know I’m concerned.

Read it here.
P.S. ChatGPT is not the only generativeAI maker under fire. Read more here.

Interesting

I have long thought that we needed a system that paid for site crawls. In the US, we are debating on whether or not to uphold copyright law -- and lawsuits are underway. But lawsuits are underway. In Japan, they aren’t upholding it for model training — and Japanese creators aren’t really happy about this.

And no matter which why you cut it the genie isn’t going back into the bottle. So how can we create a new economic reality?

You should have the freedom to lock your content. Some content can be crawled freely and other content that is behind a paywall. And guess what, Cloudflare is thinking the same thing. They want “content creators to have control over who accesses their work.”

Right now, large corporations are profiting on the backs of others because laws can’t keep up with progress. Either we all can use other people’s work now or we can’t. And decisions will need to be made soon.

I don’t know where this will go but I’ll be keeping you updated as this rolls out.