Google Is Changing Its Policy Regarding Accounts for Minors Aged 13 and Over.
If you have a Google Family Account, you might assume you can control what your child sees and does on their device. This is true, but as it turns out, only up to a point. When your child turns 13, Google will send them an email letting them know they can disable your control over their account. You’ll also receive an email, but you won’t need permission to block access to your device. Once your child decides they’re ready to fully utilize their Google Account, it’s their choice.
Despite this being Google’s official policy, this situation wasn’t widely known. After a rather viral LinkedIn post about it , parents were outraged that Google had decided their 13-year-old was ready to use the internet independently. Google Family Accounts allow children to remain supervised after they turn 13, but they can end the supervision at any time, which pretty much defeats the purpose. If your child doesn’t follow your rules, they’re unlikely to keep their account suspended when it’s not necessary.
Parents can still control their 13-year-old children’s Google accounts.
Fortunately for parents, things are changing. In a separate LinkedIn post, Google’s Kate Sharlet announced that, as part of a planned policy update, minors will be required to obtain parental permission before disabling supervision. (Sharlet also referred to turning 13 as the “age of digital consent,” which, in my opinion, is a very odd way of saying “old enough to have an unsupervised Google account.”)
When I contacted Google about the changes, the company informed me that the policy needed to be adjusted so that 13-year-olds wouldn’t be able to disable supervision without permission. However, Google’s support documents haven’t yet been updated, so it may take some time for the changes to be fully implemented.
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Referring to previous Google support documents, the company notes that when children chose to remove permissions, their devices were temporarily locked. When I asked Google about this, they said that due to a policy change, device locking was no longer a feature. However, I’m still unclear how this feature worked when children could remove permissions themselves: did parents have to manually unlock their children’s devices? Would devices unlock after a certain period of time? I’ve reached out to Google again regarding these questions, though they may no longer be relevant when teens require parental permission.
What does this mean for my child’s Google account?
As I explain in my post here , disabling controls removes many parental controls and places much more responsibility on teens. Parents can’t monitor screen time, manage payment cards and transactions, or block standard YouTube in favor of YouTube Kids. Furthermore, children can voluntarily opt out of sharing their location.
But now that parents have such authority, these restrictions can apply to your 13-year-old, too. If you want to keep their location tracking enabled, they won’t be able to turn it off; if you want to track their transactions, they won’t be able to stop you; if you don’t want them to have a credit card, they won’t be able to add one—at least until you manually disable the controls.
It’s good that Google is giving families more options, and joining other big tech companies like Meta that are doing the same.