Not allowed on a child account

[prosimian]

This was surprising to me. I passed my Lumia 920 down to my son and set it up with his MS account. On Windows, having his MS account setup as a child account to my parent account provides some fantastic parental controls and reports. But it seems linking accounts like this for WP only serves to restrict the functionality of the account without providing much in the way of custom controls.

But more specific to this topic - Cortana is disabled on child accounts, and there's no option for a parent to enable her. My kids have been loving playing with Cortana and using her to send texts, surprisingly so. Now I have to create a dummy MS account for my son to use on WP. Hope MS gives some attention to the family account setup on WP. It's ridiculously good on Win8, and that experience makes the WP experience so disappointing.

 

[MrWhiteman]

Just give them their own account and use kid's corner trust me if they wanted to go on porn they would find a way. If you are worried so much, why give them a smartphone!?

 

[mparker]

Aren't there legal issues with 3rd party data collection and tracking of minors? I suspect that's why Cortana is disabled for child accounts.

 

[prosimian]

Just give them their own account and use kid's corner trust me if they wanted to go on porn they would find a way. If you are worried so much, why give them a smartphone!?

I'm not worried about what they do, I prefer to keep them away from what I do on my phone. Kid's corner is a nice idea, but flawed (password implementation)

With their own account they can have their own password, be logged into their own Skype account, receive their own texts/messages, have their own email setup. This isn't just for access to games, it's for full phone functionality!

Cortana is just a really nice piece of functionality I hope I could authorize on a child account in the future. Hell, it's a nice little coup for MS that the kids even care!

 

[prosimian]

Aren't there legal issues with 3rd party data collection and tracking of minors? I suspect that's why Cortana is disabled for child accounts.

Could be, I hadn't considered that. Hopefully there will be a parent opt-in down the road.

For now I'll just create another parent account and let him use that, so this isn't a big deal, I was just surprised. Not being able to specify a specific store account is much more significant than this bit of trivia!

 

[T Moore]

The age on the Microsoft account profiled being used needs to be 13 or older.
US law, use of most internet services require you to be 13 years and older without parental permission and Microsoft doesn't have that set up for Cortana yet. This will probably have to be added to the parental controls.

 

[FracturedMom]

The bigger problem for Microsoft here is two fold:
1. Research shows that people will choose their OS platform for life by age 12, and tying key Windows Phone features like Quiet Hours, reminders, etc. to Cortana then disabling them for kids pushes the to less Android and Apple platforms
2. It breaks the whole MS experience: music, games/apps, SkyDrive (for school work), etc. These accounts need to work and be able to grow up with the kid if MS wants to keep them as a dedicated consumer for life, and it has to happen before age 13.

The only possible fix is to create limits preventing Cortana from publicly storing/exposing identity & location information (that's the law that drove MS to disable it) from kids and/or to provide an opt-in for all users. Frankly, I don't want Cortana accidentally publishing information that would allow stalkers to figure out where I live and work either. This is a major design flaw if MS has so little control as to have to disable Cortana to avoid breaking Federal Child Protection & Safety regulations.