[throwaway93192]

Parent and long-time ex-googler. I'm baffled that the original YT Kids was not whitelisted, and in fact I uninstalled it from my little one's ipads a long time ago. They were watching a Trolls (Dreamworks) animation, and I thought "boy, the writing on this isn't very good, but whatever". Then the plot started to become kinda bizarre and I realized it was a fake. As a user, I felt duped by YT Kids, who had promised me a window into the internet I can safely hand over to my <6-year olds. But really, it's just random people around the world uploading junk.

As an ex-googler who saw the way some (a few) PMs made decisions with their own Impact (aka career) in mind, I can cynically imagine them choosing the algorithmic method because at Google you must scale, and you get promoted by launching a cool machine learning product and not a product with <200 channels that were hand-selected (that's boring!). But as a parent all I wanted was just a few channels. Some disney, some science, etc.

[gowld]

It seems strange to (implicitly?) blame "a few PMs" for building things the wait Google management and culture demands, instead of pulling a mutiny on their employers.

[ReverseCold]

People vote with their actions time and time again that they do not care if they are tracked.

If you want a future without all this happening, stop giving your kids YouTube in the first place.

[lern_too_spel]

Parents explicitly do want to track what their children are watching. That's not the problem. The problem is that YouTube Kids promotes garbage.

[pmlnr]

Google has a lot of subscription services as well; this could be one of those, without exploiting kids.