At What Age Do Teens Get Their Own Amazon Accounts?

I’m neither a parent nor a teen, so I’m very curious about this.

Today’s parents have to answer a lot of questions that previous generations of parents never had to deal with, such as “do I insist that my child say please to the voice-activated search engine?” (You know, from the way I phrased that question, what side I come down on. But I am also not a parent.)

Are Alexa and Siri teaching our children to be rude?

But yesterday, after I posted the article announcing that Amazon was offering discounted Prime memberships to people on government assistance, I got tipped off to a Recode article about Prime membership demographics:

For the wealthiest Americans, Amazon Prime has become the norm

And okay, the thesis—the more money you make, the more likely you are to have Amazon Prime—is kind of a no-brainer. But here’s how investment bank/asset management firm Piper Jaffray collected the data:

Households that made more than $112,000 per year, on the other hand, are nearing saturation, with 82 percent in possession of Amazon Prime memberships, according to a survey of 5,500 U.S. teens about whether their families had Prime memberships.

THEY ASKED TEENS.

At first I found this hilarious, because when I was a teenager I couldn’t have listed any of the bills my parents were paying. (“What electric company does your family use?” “Um… The Electric Company?”)

But then I realized that these teens are probably very aware of their household Amazon Prime subscription because they’re regularly accessing the family Prime account, whether they’re ordering books or watching movies or being asked for the fifth time to put away the groceries that arrive in Amazon Prime Fresh boxes.

And then I wondered when teens might start asking for their own Amazon account.

The thing about Amazon accounts is that they’re super-customized, right? They give you recommendations based on everything you look at and everything you buy, which means anyone who accesses my Amazon account has a pretty good idea of what’s going on in my head. (It also means that any parent who follows the advice to “let your experimenting teen buy their first sex toy through Amazon”—which is real advice—is going to have to be ready to accept the search results.)

I don’t necessarily want my parents to see my Amazon account, and I’m a 35-year-old woman.

So what do teens do? When do parents say “here you go, it’s your very own Amazon account, you can share your interests and desires with a massive corporation but you no longer have to share them with us?”

Here’s the official statement from Amazon: “If you are under 18, you may use the Amazon Services only with involvement of a parent or guardian.” Then it clarifies that you must be 21 to purchase alcohol, but doesn’t set an age limit on any other purchases.

But Amazon also offers Amazon Allowance, which is a way for parents to give kids allowance money via Amazon, and that fine print says that teens need their own Amazon account to use Amazon Allowance, even though they still need parent/guardian “involvement.”

So it seems like teens can have their own Amazon account, although I’m not sure whether “involvement” means their parents can view everything on the account. I’m not sure about any of this, because I am neither a parent nor a teen, but I am very curious about it.

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