Google promotes Internet safety among kids, announces Web Rangers winners

NEW DELHI: Continuing with its efforts to promote digital literacy and spread awareness around internet safety, Google India on ‘Safer Internet Day’ announced the winners of the second edition of the Web Rangers initiative in India. Arnav Nagpal (14, Gurgaon), Ashutosh Sahni (17, Jalandhar), Krishna Pandit (14, Noida), Nitika Gadura (13, Bangalore) and Sarthak Gupta (13, New Delhi) were chosen as the top five national winners among thousands of entries received from students across the country.

Launched in 2015, Web Ranger's Program aspires to empower young Indian netizens to make responsible choices online and provide them with the right tools and knowledge to make these choices. The contest announced in November, last year, saw wide enthusiasm among kids from all around the country including young kids representing government schools to become ‘Web Rangers- Guardians of the Internet galaxy’. Winners will receive chromebooks and tablets as their winning prize.

As part of this contest, young kids were asked to create and run their own online safety campaigns in the form of social campaigns, posters, videos and apps. Winning entries were judged and selected based on creativity, reach and impact.

“Many of the internet users in India are coming online for the first time. We need to simplify and amplify ways by which they can stay safe. Safer Internet Day provides for an important opportunity to engage and encourage young users across the country to learn more about keeping themselves as well as their peers and families safe online,” said Chetan Krishnaswamy, Director, Public Policy, Google India.

Sunita Mohanty, Director, Trust and Safety, Google India said, “Google remains committed to providing all users a safe online experience, and help make the broader web of sites and apps more secure as well. We’re constantly improving our automatic protections, but we also want to make sure our users are empowered with the controls to adjust their security settings to ensure a safe experience. A big thank you to all the young people who shared with us their brilliant ideas and campaigns and helped us in our endeavor to make the web a safer place.”

In order to ensure a safe online experience, Google says it has been consistently working on systems and tools including spam detection and Safe browsing measuring billions of signals across sites and apps to make the web and the constellation of Android apps as well as devices safer. Safe Browsing feature warns users against unsafe websites found infected with malware, virus or a phishing trap. Google shows tens on more than 2 billion devices, across a variety of web browsers.

Google has also developed the ‘app analyzer’, a modified version of Safe Browsing that specifically hunts for dangerous apps in Google Play, other app stores, and on the web, and warns users on identifying any unsafe application. In addition, Verify Apps, a separate protection runs directly on Android devices, proactively checking more than 6 billion apps and 400 million devices every day.