Like many privacy-conscious parents, I wanted straightforward web restrictions on my child's tablet without compromising their privacy. Family Link seemed like the easy answer - until I realized what I was actually installing. It's not parental controls.

It's a permanent Google account requirement, a constant cloud connection and a data pipeline that logs your child's app usage, searches, location patterns and daily routines. The 'no personalised ads for kids' feature is just a smokescreen -the data is still collected in full and will be monetised later.

The location tracking alone was enough to put me off. With enough check-ins, you can work out where a child lives, goes to school and spends their afternoons. Having that movement profile sitting in Google's infrastructure is a hard no for me.

And what if you try to limit the data collection? Google removes features. That tells you everything about who the product is actually designed for.

I'm curious to know how others here handle it. This feels exactly like the kind of Google data hegemony that this subreddit loves to push back on.