Keeping Australian Families Safe Online
At Google and YouTube we're committed to creating a safer online experience for kids and teens. We know that while the internet is an incredible tool for learning, playing, and connecting, it also poses risks, especially for young people.
Over the years, we have invested heavily in building safety features and controls in our products that help keep Australian families safe online. We’ve built on this work by providing additional ways for parents to help their children build healthy habits – and have access to enriching educational content.
Putting Parents in Control across Google products
We’re working directly with experts and educators, like the Alannah & Madeline Foundation, to help you set boundaries and use technology in a way that’s right for your family. We build safety features into our products to protect young people, without having to change any settings. For example, we filter explicit content in Google Search. To make online searches safer and prevent accidental exposure to inappropriate content, SafeSearch is on by default for all signed-in users under 18 and blurs explicit imagery in search results.
In addition, we also believe in supporting parents to choose the parental controls that are right for their family, which is why we provide a range of tools that empower parents to secure and manage their kids' online experience - while helping them build healthy digital habits. These protections are an important way of creating an environment where children can learn and explore safely. Here are some of the most impactful features that are helping parents across Australia:
- Parental Controls for a Safe Experience: Family Link is an app we created to help you set up a supervised account for your child, allowing you to approve what apps and games they can download on their device, keep an eye on screen time and help set digital ground rules for your family. It also provides a way to manage the content your child can see, update or delete their account if needed, share location when they have their device with them, manage privacy settings and find the right balance for your family. You can set up Family Link here.
- Safe and Enriching Apps Approved by Teachers: We’ve teamed up with academic experts, teachers and child development specialists to help you identify content that’s right for your child. We help parents find quality content through a dedicated Kids Tab on Google Play that’s filled with teacher approved apps.
- Manage your child’s access to websites in Chrome browser: You can manage your child’s access to specific websites when they are using the Chrome browser on their Android or Chrome OS device. You can choose to limit your child only to websites that you are comfortable with, or block specific sites that you don’t want them to visit. You can do this through the Family Link app by tapping on Manage Settings > Google Chrome and choosing the setting that’s right for your family.
YouTube’s Ongoing Commitment to Kids and Teens
YouTube is more than just entertainment for Australian youth – it's a place for them to learn new skills, dive deep into their passions, express their unique selves, and discover creators. We understand the value of YouTube in their lives, and we're dedicated to making it a safe and positive experience. That's our top priority, and over the years we’ve invested in a range of features and policies to protect our younger users.
All our work in this area is underpinned by a set of five principles that we adhere to when building services and features for kids and teens. Their privacy, safety, wellbeing and mental health is at the core of our work. We also work with and are advised by independent experts in child development, digital learning, and children’s media, from academic, nonprofit and clinical backgrounds.
From combating the promotion of eating disorders and suicide to introducing privacy and wellbeing protections as well as removing harmful content that endangers children and age-restricting content for viewers below 18, we take our responsibility towards young people very seriously.
We know that every family is different, with unique views and needs, so we also provide parents with a range of options and tools to customise YouTube experiences for their children:
- Age-appropriate YouTube experiences: We have a separate app called YouTube Kids that offers a more contained and curated environment for kids. On the main YouTube app, we offer a parent-managed version of YouTube for pre-teens called supervised experiences and just this month, we also announced new safeguards for teen supervision, that allow parents and teens the option to link their accounts and get shared insights and notifications.
- Teen Wellbeing Tools & Resources: We recognise how content consumed online can affect the wellbeing of teens. Teens are more likely than adults to form negative beliefs about themselves when seeing repeated messages about ideal standards in content they consume online. With the insights of our independent experts we developed additional safeguards for content recommendations for teens, while still allowing them to explore the topics they love. We're also collaborating with organisations like the World Health Organization (WHO) and Common Sense Networks to develop public, industry-wide educational resources related to teens and online wellbeing.
- Empowering Teens to Manage Their Screen Time: Our work to create age-appropriate and safer experiences on YouTube is ongoing, and we’ve had existing products and features such as Take a Break and Bedtime reminders since 2018. We also revamped these features to be more visually prominent and appear more frequently. Particularly for viewers under 18 we have these reminders turned on by default on their accounts, and across Short and long-form videos, with a default setting for Take a Break reminders every 60 minutes. Moreover, we have disabled autoplay by default for teenagers to give them more control over their viewing experience. We know every family has different viewing preferences, so digital wellbeing tools can be adjusted in their settings.
We're not just building platforms; we're building a future where kids and teens can explore the online world with confidence, creativity, and a sense of wonder. This is an ongoing journey, and we're committed to continuously listening, learning, and improving to make Google and YouTube the best they can be for young people everywhere.
