Can your kid screw up your Google-verse? Kinda

Had something interesting happen with the Nest Hub Max recently that was supplied to us by the fine folks at Google (at least I’m assuming.)

tl;dr – you get the message below you may have to turn on digital wellbeing even if it’s not on for anything.

I found one day that I could not access web content on any of my smart screen devices. I’ve got a Lenovo Smart Display (I don’t think they make these any more,) and a couple of Nest Hubs and a Nest Hub Max. Suddenly if I asked something and got a google search result, I couldn’t tap on anything and was told “websites are turned off for this device” and to check g.co/assistant/webfilter

What had happened recently was on my oldest’s phone I taught it how to recognize her so that she could use the Look and Talk feature on the Nest Hub Max. She’s gotten a kick out of walking in the room and the display saying hello to her in text on the screen.

Well, that bit of recognition made it so we had to set up Digital Wellbeing and explicitly allow web pages, even though I didn’t see her as an associated account. It’s in there somewhere and it affected every device I had.

Takes about 10 seconds per device with a screen to enable that in the Google Home app, but since I had no clue what had changed this took some research.

Anyway, all good now and there’s some newly added “don’t talk to Google after 9pm technology slapped in there that’s useful. I don’t really worry about her trying to watch anything, but I do worry about her asking questions about the universe until 3am. It’s something I would have done.