Windows 10: Acute child gaming addiction vs Microsoft Policy (aaaggghhh!!)

Hi All


First time question from me and it's not straightforward, but I'll try to be as succinct as I can....


My partner’s 12 year old son has an acute gaming addiction (Fortnite, etc.). They live in Finland, me in the UK so I'm largely trying to deal with the issue from 1300 miles away.

- He oroginally set up his MS account as an adult, and him as administrator on his (Windows 10) PC.

- In order to try and help deal with his addiction I removed him as admin, made his mother admin, ‘cancelled’ his falsely created MS adult account, created a new MS child account, invited the child to join the group via the mother’s account, accepted the invite and set up gaming restriction times.


This has not solved anything because:

- MS policy provides an account ‘cool-off period’ of at least 30 days, even though the adult account was created by a child.

- Changing the adult account to a child account does not help because MS recognises the original adult account only.

- You cannot change the password during the 'cool off period' so the child still has full access

- If you log in and use the account at any time during the cool off period it voids the original account closure request, so the kid logs in and it's happy days for him. Having dealt with probably around ten MS agents across many hours in the last month, not ONE alerted me to this until today.


Apparently the only option is to raise it with MS engineers, but today's agent deleted the dialogue before I could record how to do so! Before doing so he did acknowledge that many agents won't have had any experience with this issue, hence why I've been given so much conflicting information.

Meanwhile my partner - a single working mother with two other challenging kids in another country - is trying to single-handedly tackle acute gaming addiction that is severely affecting her 12 year old son's education: caused in part by some twisted 'Groundhog Day' Microsoft policy that blindly seeks account retention regardless of the circumstance.


Any advice and guidance on how to pursue this issue would be much appreciated, folks.


Best Wishes

Stu

:)

 

Acute child gaming addiction vs Microsoft Policy (aaaggghhh!!)

Hi All

First time question from me and it's not straightforward, but I'll try to be as succinct as I can....

My partner’s 12 year old son has an acute gaming addiction (Fortnite, etc.). They live in Finland, me in the UK so I'm largely trying to deal with the issue from 1300 miles away.

- He oroginally set up his MS account as an adult, and him as administrator on his (Windows 10) PC.

- In order to try and help deal with his addiction I removed him as admin, made his mother admin, ‘cancelled’ his falsely created MS adult account, created a new MS child account, invited the child to join the group via the mother’s account, accepted
the invite and set up gaming restriction times.

This has not solved anything because:

- MS policy provides an account ‘cool-off period’ of at least 30 days, even though the adult account was created by a child.

- Changing the adult account to a child account does not help because MS recognises the original adult account only.

- You cannot change the password during the 'cool off period' so the child still has full access

- If you log in and use the account at any time during the cool off period it voids the original account closure request, so the kid logs in and it's happy days for him. Having dealt with probably around ten MS agents across many hours in the last
month, not ONE alerted me to this until today.

Apparently the only option is to raise it with MS engineers, but today's agent deleted the dialogue before I could record how to do so! Before doing so he did acknowledge that many agents won't have had any experience with this issue, hence why I've
been given so much conflicting information.

Meanwhile my partner - a single working mother with two other challenging kids in another country - is trying to single-handedly tackle acute gaming addiction that is severely affecting her 12 year old son's education: caused in part by some twisted
'Groundhog Day' Microsoft policy that blindly seeks account retention regardless of the circumstance.

Any advice and guidance on how to pursue this issue would be much appreciated, folks.

Best Wishes

Stu

 

Acute child gaming addiction vs Microsoft Policy (aaaggghhh!!)

Your friend is not going to have it easy no matter what, because fundamentally, game providers don't give a d*mn about protecting our children. Same for other content providers like YouTube, Spotify, Facebook, etc. There's no money in protecting children.

From a technical perspective, there's a great deal of third-party parental control software from developers who do this for a living (so expect to pay.) I actually found that European developers did a much better job at this - they must have stricter laws
over there. (I'm writing from the US.)

As for Microsoft's policies ... you may as well forget about it. They have millions of different peoples' opinions to deal with.

 

Acute child gaming addiction vs Microsoft Policy (aaaggghhh!!)

Thanks for the response BulldogXX, much appreciated.

To clarify, I suppose I'm asking two different things: how best to control the gaming from a tech perspective, and secondly how best to pursue Microsoft's flagrant 'inability' to deal with a kid setting up an adult account, and the associated consequences.

It took a twelve year old approximately five seconds to set up an adult account (date of birth entry), yet trying to unpick the consequences of those five seconds appear insurmountable. That's not right, so in my view Microsoft does have a responsibility
to answer for this.

My primary question then, is how can I pose that question to Microsoft in the most constructive way.

Cheers

Stu