Google

How I fixed web pages blocked on Nest Hub Max

I’d mentioned a while ago that I found it exceedingly cool that I could watch Plex on my Nest Hub Max in the kitchen. That went away for me within the past week or so with no changes on my end.

TL;DR – got kids? Their accounts might interfere if they’re under 13 and get linked to the display even if it doesn’t look like digital wellbeing is turned on.

Seriously, other than paying a bill for storage and music service I’ve had no interactions with Google in a couple of weeks. No account changes for my kids. No password resets. Nada. Voice of Morgan Freeman: Paul was wrong.

For ADD reasons today involving Kate Bush playing on my wife’s car’s radio, I started wondering what Solsbury Hill (by Peter Gabriel) was about and asked the Nest Hub Max in my kitchen what it was about. It pulled up a Google search where there was a link that supposedly explained it. I tapped the link and got the message below:

2022 07 14 06.55.45 - for some reason we don't have an alt tag here

“Can’t be shown

Websites are turned off for this device.

Learn more:
g.co/assistant/webfilter

The main suggestion was that digital wellbeing was turned on. It wasn’t. Not for that device. This was the same issue I had with my old Nest Hub when I was playing with Plex but had not investigated far. Been a busy few weeks.

Clicking that on my phone I saw this:

“…Can’t access the web if Digital Wellbeing filters are turned on or a supervised account for a child under 13 (or the applicable age in your country) is linked to your Smart Display.”

My 9yo wanted to play with Look and Talk. While I thought her account was associated with the unit from day 1, probably not.

I went in on the Google Home app and added a new digital wellbeing filter to the Nest Hub Max. It had none before. The only filters I had set up were for the kid rooms. There I explicitly gave the Nest Hub Max permissions, and just like that I was once again able to open web pages on my Google Hub Max.

Also as a side note, I was thinking of the song Family Snapshot, not Solsbury Hill.

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Paul E King

Paul King started with GoodAndEVO in 2011, which merged with Pocketables, and as of 2018 he's evidently the owner. He lives in Nashville, works at a film production company, is married with two kids. Facebook | Twitter | Donate | More posts by Paul | Subscribe to Paul's posts

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