By Mallory Mattingly
One mom just called out Google for “grooming” her son after the tech giant told him how to turn off parent controls.
According to First Post News, “An online child safety advocate has criticised Google for what she described as an alarming intrusion into parental authority, after the company emailed her 12-year-old son informing him that he would soon be eligible to turn off parental supervision on his account.”
Melissa McKay, the president of the Digital Childhood Institute, shared the screenshots of the email in a now-viral LinkedIn post, sounding off about Google’s “reprehensible” method of contacting her young son.
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“A trillion-dollar corporation is directly contacting every child to tell them they are old enough to ‘graduate’ from parental supervision. The email explains how a child can remove those controls themselves, without parental consent or involvement,” McKay wrote on LinkedIn earlier this week.
“Google is asserting authority over a boundary that does not belong to them,” she continued. “It reframes parents as a temporary inconvenience to be outgrown and positions corporate platforms as the default replacement.”
“Call it what it is. Grooming for engagement. Grooming for data. Grooming minors for profit,” the mom emphasized. “In nearly 10 years as an online safety advocate, this is among the most predatory corporate practices I have seen. Absolutely reprehensible. Corporations should stay the h*** away from our kids.”
The email Google sent to her son read: “Your birthday’s coming up. That means when you turn 13, you can choose to update your account to get more access to Google apps and services.”
It sparked outrage online, putting pressure on Google. The tech company has since updated its policy to “now require parental approval to disable the controls,” per the Daily Mail.
“Every child develops differently, and parents should be the ones to decide with their child when the right time is for parental controls to change,” Rani Govender, a policy manager at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, said, per Daily Mail. “Leaving children to make decisions in environments where misinformation is rife, user identities are unknown, and risky situations occur, can put them in harm’s way.”
In response to the outcry, a Google spokesman said, “We’re making a planned update to require formal parental approval for teens to leave a supervised account. This builds on our existing practice of emailing both the parent and child before the change to facilitate family conversations about the account transition.”
McKay’s story is a good reminder that parents must monitor their children’s online presence for any nefarious activity.
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