I did a lot of stupid stuff when I was 14 years old. I’m glad that back then the “online world” was in its infancy, and none of my escapades were harmful or salacious enough to make it into some kind of eternal digital infamy. Not so for one underage Google user in the UK. According to his parent, some indiscreet activity has locked his entire family out of their Google accounts, causing chaos.
Heads up, folks. This story is going to involve horny teenagers doing horny teenager things. But what happened, or at least what happened according to a Reddit poster, might be worth considering for all parents.
According to this anonymous post on the LegalAdviceUK subreddit, a 14-year-old boy was using a shared family tablet, which had parental controls enabled. The kid opened the Gemini app and proceeded to do… well, horny teenager stuff, which the poster describes as “roleplay” and “pleasur[ing]” himself, including using the Gemini Live mode with access to the tablet’s camera.
The good news is that Gemini recognized what was happening with an underage user and locked down the 14-year-old’s user account, though this seems to have taken “a couple of days.” The bad news is that every other Google account connected to the tablet got the same lockdown. First both parents, then the boy’s sister, followed by an older sister who’s in college elsewhere in the UK. According to the post, five people (three of whom are adults) have been completely cut off from their essential email, documents, and tons of other personal information, all because of one teenager’s mistake.
“All of our entire family’s Google accounts were linked to that tablet. Google banned them all,” writes the poster.
Everything gone. 15 years of business completely inaccessible. All my emails, all my documents saved in Google Drive. Even my website was linked to my Google account and that’s been locked down too…
I don’t know how I’m going to pay my mortgage in 3 months time…
My daughter was having a breakdown in Scotland because her dissertation is due in 7 weeks. I tried to book a flight to see her and realised I couldn’t do that without an email address…
“My whole life is completely fucked,” writes the poster, with understandable frustration. “Is there any legal mechanism I can use to get all my Google accounts back?”
Tada Images / shutterstock.com
This is a tough story to write. On the one hand, having systems that detect and deter kids from accessing explicit material, and finding and reporting anything at all that could fall under the banner of “child porn,” is a big deal. For companies like Google, it’s an existential threat—being seen as lenient or negligent in any way for this could cause a disastrous user and regulatory reaction. And we’ve seen that the nature of generative “AI” and large language models makes it particularly difficult to lock down explicit or harmful material.
But taking the post at face value, the parents and other members of the family did nothing wrong. (I’d argue that even the 14-year-old did nothing wrong per se, just stupid—a word the parent uses to describe his actions.) They even did the right thing with a locked-down child account on the tablet. But they, and apparently Google, didn’t account for the possibility of a kid using Gemini’s camera access in this kind of situation. And now five people’s lives have been thrown for a loop.
I don’t envy the parents their task. Getting hold of a human at Google for technical support is a Sisyphean struggle at the best of times. Even major YouTubers who earn the company a huge chunk of change can have a hard time getting access. For a regular user, and for an issue this delicate and complicated, this is a nightmare scenario.
For whatever it’s worth, I’m reaching out to professional contacts at Google about the situation. I assume they won’t be able to say much about this user’s problems for reasons of privacy, but hopefully a little wider attention will help elevate this particular case and find a solution. I’ll update the story if I get a substantive response from Google.
