On creating an Outlook.com account for a minor

Well, I finally did it: I went and created an outlook.com email for Son’s online stuff.

What brought this on? Minecraft. I’ve got Pocket Minecraft on my Kindle for him to mess with, but he wants the full version on his PC. He’s positively OBSESSED with Minecraft.

So I finally went looking. I went ahead and signed up for a Mojang account, and I figured it was as good a time as any to use a separate email account for him, that I control. He won’t know about it until I think he’s good and ready to use it, but we can use it for games and stuff.

As I filled out the outlook.com new account stuff, I was a little surprised once I put his date of birth in that it didn’t fuss at me. Okay. But once I’d entered everything correctly and entered the captcha, hey presto! I got a totally different-looking webpage saying, “Oh look! A minor. You need to get a parent now…”

Okay, so I had to log into my outlook.com account and verify that I’m an adult – with a credit card, of course. Here came this next interesting bit: Microsoft charged me $0.50, which will not get pushed back; instead, “a portion” of it will be donated to “charity.” (Yeah, I’d still like to know how much, and to what, or at least a list of charities it could go to.)

So it was an interesting experience, and I think that Microsoft took a good approach to it.