I set up a child with a Chromebook and made the child a member of a Google Play “Family Group”. I then set the child account to require approval for in-app purchases. The credit card associated with the family group was a United Mileage Plus card from Chase.
I thought that everything was going well because the “order history” page on Google Play shows the family group and does not show any unfamiliar purchases. It shows that the approval required for in-app purchases setting remains in place.
Then it was tax time so I looked at my end-of-year Visa card summary. Whoa! Hundreds of dollars in spending on in-app purchases (the card was on autopay and I don’t use it for much else so I hadn’t looked) in small amounts, e.g., $1.99 to $9.99. As there had never been any activity like this on the card for 10+ years I would have thought that it would have triggered a fraud warning, but it did not. These purchases show up only in the child account, not on the page belonging to the owner of the Family Group who entered in the credit card info.
I called up the Chase folks and they’ve temporarily reversed all of the charges. Google Play doesn’t seem to offer a customer service phone number. I’m wondering if anyone else has dealt with a similar situation.
It seems like a terrible design feature to have the only way to monitor spending on a linked Google Play account be to check in with the credit card bank every few days.
Does Apple deal with this in a smarter/better way?
Has anyone ever managed to reach Google “customer service” for anything?
I’ve had the same problem with a Fire tablet and a child buying a bunch of apps, without my approval. He’s 5 and can’t read, so I can hardly blame him for doing this. I had to coach him on what to do, since it’s confusing, as a lot of the apps are free under the Freetime feature.
The parental controls in general are immature and poorly designed.
I have the feature turned on where the credit card company emails me every time there’s a charge. Normally the phone in my pocket dings before the cashier even hands me the paper receipt.
I’ve had identical problem with my 5-year old, Phil. Apple and Google aren’t sympathetic or helpful. I cancelled some of the charges.
Wouldn’t it be better not to have the child linked to a credit card at all?
The kid should get an emailed receipt for each purchase. Setup a filter in their account to forward those emails to you. Or, depending on their age, just forward all their incoming emails to you…
“It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It” – Upton Sinclair
Google has no reason to fix this so-called “problem” when they are making 30% on those transactions.
My kids are only just getting to the tablet age but I don’t have a credit card linked to anything they can access and they don’t know the password on my phone. I think (hope) this prevents any surprise charges. My best case scenario is that this renders the tablet less fun and they end up playing it less.
I have also had this problem with an Amazon Fire. The tablet does have parental controls, but they are pitiful. Eg, you can require a pin for a child to watch a video, but the same logic applies whether the video is free or costs money. Furthermore, the parental approval pin-entry screen does not tell what the parent is approving! It just says to enter a pin, with saying whether it is a video, what video it is, how much it costs, or anything.
@philg
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Schmuck. What did you think was going to happen?
Give yourself some credit. At least you are smart enough to be rich enough to be able to afford being so foolish with your money.
(Okay, technically you were foolish with a line of credit, but why bring M1, M2, etc., into it?)
What did I think was going to happen? That when a member of the family group wanted to spend some money on my credit card, for which supposedly approval was required, that I would get an email saying “Click here to approve this purchase”.
Apple requires Apple ID password for purchases, which is different from device PIN, so in most simple configuration you just don’t tell child the password.
Very hard to contact an actual “person” when contacting Google for help.
I do not know anything about Google Play for buying stuff. But any site that I register with to buy stuff, I first look to see if there is an option to opt-out of saving my credit card info on that site. Sure, this means i have to re-enter my card info anytime I use that site, but that is one less data about me not getting hacked in case that site gets hacked.
Btw, I have come across sites that now ask you if you want to authenticate with your credit card company to finish the checkout process. What this does is, the site will link you to your credit card company and prompt you to login and authorize the charge. This, I love because it adds a second level of verification. It is basically the same idea as if you are using PayPall.
My daughter does not have the permission to make IAPs on her iPad, my wife does, and when she does, I get an email notification as the Family Sharing lead.
Isn’t the root problem that the IAPs went through without parental authorization, not that they are reported in the wrong screen? Or perhaps your child learned to “shoulder-surf” your password, mine (age 6) is already proficient at it and managed to snarf her mother’s password (since changed) as well as her grandparents’. She doesn’t have mine because I practice sound OpSec, so she asked Siri “what is Papa’s password?” instead, to no avail…
@philg
So when I was about eight, my Grandma had a minitel. I thought it was a cool looking gadget, much cooler than my merlin and sort of like the trs-80.
The other thing I remember is my mom telling me not too touch it because it cost a lot of money to use.
You can buy Google Play cards for any denomination, with cash. It limits your exposure. Pay for your drinks with cash and NEVER bust out the credit card when at a strip club.
For people that are “spendning challanged” use gift cards and link them to the account. I do this with itunes gift cards all the time. I’m sure the Goo has copied Apple by now.
@philg – I have experience with Apple and Verizon
1) with apple what you do is setup a family sharing and then when the child attempts a purchase one of the guardians in the family will get an immediate prompt on their ios device – do you approve of those charges, yes or no.
2) with verizon (ordering something on pay per view) no such luck, in fact they make it super easy to order, usually 1 click order. My 7 yr old racked up $200 in charges watching collegiate basketball games without understanding that they weren’t free. I was able to reverse those charges
3) I don’t have family sharing experience with Google, but I do have experience with their customer support since we spend a bunch on adwords every month. Int is very difficult to get in touch with someone unless your budget is in millions. Google fundamentally is not a consumer company – it is a more of an academic campus setup with a mass surveillance element, it is a very strange entity to interact with
The best answer is to hide the tablets in your (physical) library and in the bushes outside in the park so they don’t continue to suck your kids brains out and and exacerbate myopia.