People in all countries have kids, so it's a bit disheartening when a feature launches for families and it's limited to the US. That was the story with Family Link last year, which was only available in the US at first. However, the parental control service started expanding shortly after, adding Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland, then Canada this past February. We might have missed the memo too, because it added a few more countries between then and now (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Japan, Mexico, UK). That made the total eleven, but now Family Link is expanding to 26 new countries, all in the EU.

There wasn't an official announcement, but as part of the European GDPR, Google has implemented Family Link in the EU to let parents create accounts for their children and retain control over their devices and apps under the new EU provisions. Since the UK and Ireland already had Family Link, 26 of the 28 EU countries are now seeing the service available to them:

  • Austria
  • Belgium
  • Bulgaria
  • Croatia
  • Cyprus
  • Czech Republic
  • Denmark
  • Estonia
  • Finland
  • France
  • Germany
  • Greece
  • Hungary
  • Italy
  • Latvia
  • Lithuania
  • Luxembourg
  • Malta
  • Netherlands
  • Poland
  • Portugal
  • Romania
  • Slovakia
  • Slovenia
  • Spain
  • Sweden

For most of these countries, parents can retain control over a Family Link account until their child reaches the age of 16, with the exception of Austria (14 years old), and Denmark and Sweden (13 years old).

The Family Link app already shows as available to me in the Austrian Play Store, so it seems that the option is either already live for all or rolling out now. And if you're wondering what you can do with Family Link, we had an extensive hands-on when it first launched. Plus, don't forget that it also lets you set up Voice Match for Google Assistant too so your kid can get appropriate answers from your smart speakers.

Google Family Link Developer: Google LLC
Price: Free
4.2
Download

Source: Google