A child rights advocacy organisation in the United States is accusing Google of bypassing parental authority by allowing children to disable parental supervision over Google accounts after they turn 13.
Melissa McKay, president of the Digital Childhood Institute, stated on LinkedIn that Google sent her 12-year-old an email that will unlock additional tools once he turns 13, posting screenshots of the email.
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In Google’s frequently asked questions, it shows that children can disable tools that allow parents to supervise accounts once they are what is known as the minimum age in their country, which is often 13 in many countries.
Among the changes, once children turn the age of 13, they can turn off supervised experiences on YouTube and can add payment methods to Google Pay. Parents will no longer be able to block apps, turn on location sharing without the permission of the child user or block access to payment features.
“Google is asserting authority over a boundary that does not belong to them. It reframes parents as a temporary inconvenience to be outgrown and positions corporate platforms as the default replacement,” McKay said in a post on LinkedIn.
Parents are able to supervise Google accounts through a programme called Family Link up until age 13.
“In nearly ten years as an online safety advocate, this is among the most predatory corporate practices I have seen,” she added.
McKay first raised the complaint in October, in a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
“Enabling minors at this critical stage of development to terminate parental oversight, even when parents expressly seek to maintain such protections, constitutes a clear breach of duty of care,” McKay said in the letter shared with Al Jazeera.
McKay told Al Jazeera she had met with then FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson and said she had spent 45 minutes with him and his staff to walk through the complaints prior to sending the letter.
The 50-page document alleges that the Silicon Valley tech giant violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which is a law that puts limits on how tech companies can collect and use personal data from children under the age of 13.
The letter also alleges a violation of the 2014 FTC Consent Decree on in-app purchases, which requires platforms like Google to get parental permission before allowing such purchases by children.
Other parental rights activists echoed McKay’s worries.
“Our concern is that messaging like Google’s – telling a 13-year-old they can now remove parental supervision – sends the signal that parents are barriers to freedom, rather than partners in growth. This type of corporate language accelerates tech independence without any built-in safety net, education, or emotional readiness. We’re worried it normalises the idea that kids should ‘go it alone’ online just because they’ve reached an arbitrary age,” Joanne Ma, cofounder of DigiDefendr, a new platform that helps teach kids about safe practices online, told Al Jazeera.
Representatives for Alphabet, Google’s parent company, did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
The FTC did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
The Utah State Attorney General’s office, the state in which McKay is based, as well as Senator Mike Lee of Utah, who has been behind several pushes for age verification laws in the US – including regarding social media use and access to adult explicit material, did not respond to a request for comment.
A risky environment
Google has long been under the microscope for the relationship between kids and teens and their slate of tools. A lawsuit in 2025 alleged that the tech giant harvested data on Chromebooks used by students for schoolwork in public school systems around the US. Another report in 2024 alleged that Google sales representatives advised potential advertisers about how to target teens on YouTube.
In 2019, the tech giant also settled a lawsuit with the New York State Attorney General for collecting the personal data of children using YouTube. It paid $136m in fines to the FTC and another $34m to New York.
Even beyond Google platforms, the online landscape has been an increasingly volatile place for children and teens, and 48 percent of teens reported that social media usage had a negative impact on their mental health, according to a survey last year by the Pew Research Center.
As cellphone and technology use, especially among younger people, escalates, including the rising use of chatbots like ChatGPT, online safety experts are flashing warning signs. About 72 percent of the US teens say they use ChatGPT, for instance, and a report from the Center For Counting Digital Hate found that the OpenAI-owned chatbot lacked sufficient safeguards like age verification tools.
The report also assessed if the chatbot would encourage dangerous behaviours by creating personas showing tendencies for substance abuse, suicidal ideation and eating disorders, with 53 percent of responses to prompts deemed as harmful.
“Continued parental supervision should be the default and NOT something that the child opts into. This is a decision that Google and other corporations need to make within their own policy. There should be some corporate responsibility here, especially with all that is out there about youth mental health and how it relates to social media,” Tracy Parolin, the other cofounder of DigiDefendr, told Al Jazeera.
