Google's Symbaloo-the Hard Porn Gateway for K-5
It's probably on your kid's Chromebook
WARNING: THIS VIDEO AND THIS POST CONTAIN CONTENT NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN.
Click HERE to watch the video from Marsha Metzger, (parentsonthelevel.com) in Georgia, who was alerted to the issue by a friend in Texas. At the same time, Nebraska researchers were following their own thread.
Symbaloo is a Google product. They advertise themselves as “The #1 Homepage for Education.” It is being used by many schools, school librarians, and classroom teachers.
From Wikipedia:
Symbaloo is a cloud-based site that allows users to organize and categorize web links in the form of buttons. Symbaloo works from a web browser and can be configured as a homepage, allowing users to create a personalized virtual desktop accessible from any device with an Internet connection. Multilingual, Founded 2007
Symbaloo provides links to the most popular Ed Tech sites and has a friendly interface for organizing student weblinks, but at its core it is a Google browser, and it can take you anywhere on the web. Our researchers found it remarkably easy to land at a hard-core porn site through Symbaloo.
Symbaloo is wildly profitable for Google. The perpetual ads beckon to impressionable kids like a circus barker, impossible to ignore. This is not altruism; this is naked exploitation. It is $59 a year for a classroom to go “ad free.”
Marilyn Asher of Omaha, Nebraska, is President of Nebraskans for Founders’ Values (nffv.org). She was alerted to the Symbaloo porn issue by a friend in Colorado. She found that you can put innocuous words into the search engine to get to porn through school media center websites. Here is a graphic from a Nebraska elementary school’s library link:
Until recently, typing in Girl+Doll took you to a host of escort services.
I was curious as to whether this feature was unique to Symbaloo, or if the problem is the Google browser in general. I haven’t used Google in years. I pulled up the Google browser and typed in boysfood. The entire first page contained only web links to a porn site by that name, offered free from Pornhub.
I didn’t scroll past the first page, because our school children are now state mandated to take a course on Media Literacy. With curriculum developed by a dark money NGO, News Literacy Project, students learn that anything NOT on the first page of Google is fake news, and they should only use Google. This newsletter published previous articles about Media Literacy HERE, and HERE.
Back to my experiment, I typed “boysfood” into my Duck Duck Go browser and the first page was all about Po’boys, some articles warning about online porn, and inexplicably, a wikipedia page on how to measure one’s penis. Not a single link to the porn site even when I continued scrolling down.
Clearly Google is pushing porn. Clearly Google is courting the youth market by capturing the schools. Symbaloo is their Trojan horse.
Back to Marilyn Asher and her story. She discovered that many, many Nebraska school districts were using Symbaloo. She contacted all of them, assuming they would be just as horrified as she was. Most of them were, and the link disappeared from many media centers. Some had to be threatened with legal action before they found their will to be responsible.
One school district remains particularly recalcitrant. Papillion-La Vista. I wonder if it has anything to do with this:
Grant recipients include:
Papillion Community Foundation, to support the Papillion La Vista Media Academy, which expands student production capabilities for community-focused live broadcasts.
What you can do
Symbaloo is the harmless appearing gateway to the Google search engine, but the problem is really the Google search engine. Getting rid of Symbaloo will not solve the problem. Every student has a Chromebook, generally front loaded with Google as a search engine. Many devices were donated through grants funded by Google or NGO’s. They want you to believe it is “for the children.” It is for access to your children. Nothing is free. Nothing is accidental. The corporotacracy gives your kids what it wants them to use. (If you haven’t noticed that porn has become prevalent in school library books, you aren’t paying attention.)
First, school districts, teachers, and parents will need to make a concerted effort to switch to a different search engine on every device used by students. Even if the school librarian has taken Symbaloo down from the media center website, the app may still be on multiple school and student devices.
Second, Senator Joni Albrecht has been termed out of the Nebraska legislature. Each year that she was in office, she presented a bill that would have put the onus on Ed Tech firms to block sexually explicit material. If they didn’t block it, they could not contract with schools in Nebraska. The sites have the ability to block pornography and will do so if a specific school district demands it. The bill was killed in the Judiciary Committee every single year. Will your Nebraska Senator pick up where she left off? Ask them.
Third, This law was passed last year by the Nebraska Legislature. To the lawyers out there- are Google, and the school districts using Google, in violation of this law?
Commercial entity; reasonable age verification method; required; when.
(1) A commercial entity shall not knowingly and intentionally publish or distribute material harmful to minors on the Internet on a website that contains a substantial portion of such material unless the entity uses a reasonable age verification method to verify the age of an individual attempting to access the material.
(2) A commercial entity or third party that performs an age verification required by this section shall not retain any identifying information of the individual after access has been granted to the material. nebraskalegislature.gov
Finally, no matter how vigilant you are, there is no safe online experience for young children. Parents can strictly limit their children’s access to harmful sites at home, and they assume the schools have the same blocking technology. Parents are wrong about that.
It isn’t that schools couldn’t block the bad stuff, rather they don’t want to. Data is a commodity, and school districts profit from governmental and corporate desire to collect that commodity. The grant money flows from the sale of access to student data, eyes and minds. We have reviewed a lot of Ed Tech the past couple of years. Pretty much all of it exploits students in one way or another.
by Sue Greenwald, M.D. The author is a co-founder of Nebraska Education Coalition