Your Parents Can Now Lock You Out of Your Smart Phone Apps, But Only Until You're Thirteen

Google will be releasing a new parental control app, Family Link, that will effectively allow your folks to monitor the smart phone's usage and restrict its use during "bedtime hours".

The catch is, though, once you hit your teens (i.e. the big number 13), you can "graduate" to a life of unrestricted smart phone use. Yee haw.

 

Obviously, the catch is that your parents can lie to Google about your age, leaving you to censored internet for perpetuity (or at least until you're 16 or 18).

The app works with the parent remotely approving and rejecting apps that are downloaded onto the phone as well as getting weekly reports on the phone's usage, including how many hours are clocked up on certain apps.

The app also filters out sites that contain mature content, turning the sometimes-frightening web into the equivalent of a digital fluffy cushion. Obviously, things get past filters all the time, so for the more extreme parents, they can flick a switch that means they'll have to approve each site that is accessed.

The app is already available on the Apple app store as well as the Play store, so prepare yourself.

It comes as another parental control system has begun trials across forty schools in Australia, which allow both schools and parents to lock access to smart phones regardless of where they are.

I liked growing up when the internet was a new fandangled thing. It's a scary, new world.

Photo: iStock