Google pledges $20 million for digital wellbeing of kids and teens

Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org, has committed $20 million to support organizations that promote digital wellbeing, mental health and online safety for kids and teens.

In a detailed blog post, the tech giant also outlined how it is helping families stay safe and find the right balance with technology. These include:

• Easy access to Family Link: Google is simplifying the process for parents to locate and adjust the settings for Family Link - a service that helps parents manage their children's accounts and devices as they explore online. Parents logged into their Google Accounts can simply search for "parental controls," and a dedicated information box will appear listing the accounts they supervise along with quick links to each supervised account's settings.
• Securely password sharing within families: Google will soon be introducing a new option that allows family group members to share usernames and passwords for a particular website or service directly from Google Password Manager.
• Enhanced SafeSearch settings: While SafeSearch is automatically enabled for users under 18, Google is making it even easier for adults to adjust these settings directly on the Search results page.

To foster teen digital wellbeing on YouTube, Google has revamped the "Take a Break" and "Bedtime reminders" features to be more visibly prominent and appear more frequently.

• The take a break feature lets you set a reminder to take a break while watching videos. The reminder will pause your video until you dismiss it or resume playing the video.
• Bedtime reminders let you set reminders at specific times to stop watching videos and go to bed. You set start and end times in your Settings, including whether or not you want the prompt to interrupt a video or wait until the video is over. You'll also be able to dismiss or snooze the reminder.

Both features are set to On by default for teens.