Parents told The Wall Street Journal they have to continuously check their Screen Time settings to ensure their children's usage is limited.
Some Apple users say its parental controls aren’t working properly. A CEO who has 4 kids called it ‘frustrating.’::Parents told The Wall Street Journal they have to continuously check their Screen Time settings to ensure their children’s usage is limited.
The other frustrating thing about Apple’s parental controls is that you need another Apple device to use them. Good old fashioned brand lock-in. No good reason you couldn’t manage this in a browser.
and this is why I’ll always choose Google over Apple. Despite Google’s flaws of surrepticiously killing their products. At least they don’t have these ridiculous walled garden that Apple has. See, for example, Google’s parental control app/solution: https://families.google/familylink/
Anyway, small side rant. I am a big big big advocate of parent’s doing their job as parents of setting up parental controls on devices their kids have access to. It is SO MUCH of a better option than the government requiring us adults to give up our privacy to verify that we are indeed adults to see adult content. Like, yes, I do want to see adult content. But hell no there’s no way in hell I’m violating my privacy with privacy invasive big brothery bullshit.
Either that or the kids found workarounds. I never had to deal with any of this myself, but I remember that being pretty common back in the day. Some you could even just ctrl+alt+del and close it in the task manager, do what you wanted, then open it back up to make it look like nothing had changed, though the parents would have to be technically competent to some degree to even check for that.
I think the systems these days are better but probably still aren’t foolproof. Decent chance one of the kids even shoulder surfed or otherwise figured out the password, or maybe just found the parent’s device unsecured and removed the limitations, which would be consistent with the claims of setting them one day then a few days later they are just gone.
Screen time limits hasn’t been working for months, have had several support cases in regards to it, debugging and logs sent to Apple and nothing.
Second to last time they actually admitted to having problems with the function (accidentally I am sure since I can bet money on that they aren’t allowed to admitting to faults).
It works on my 2 boys’ but not on my daughter’s. Good thing is she told me it wasn’t working and still followed the rules by not using it after a certain time of day. She’s a great kid. On the other hand, both of my boys would have totally abused it.
Another annoying thing is if you approve an app from the App Store once, it’s approved for install forever.
Going off what you had mentioned about apps with chat features, we’ve run into times where we’ll approve the app thinking it’s fine, but then our kid finds out they can chat with random strangers and divulge personal information. At that point we delete the app, but they can reinstall it whenever they want without requiring parental approval again. 😬
Yup. Not to mention we have a Roku, iPhone, Chromebook, and Switch we have to manage, with three kids profiles on each.
Another thing, I have a 13 year old and a lot of apps (like YouTube) have little kid and adult.
When I was a kid and had cable there were lots of content edited for mass consumption. You could turn on TBS and watch an R movie edited down to somewhere between PG and PG-13. No one is editing down all this content now.
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What a hassle. Might actually have to be a present parent in your child’s life. 😰
That’s a typical layer-8 problem. #pebkac
The other frustrating thing about Apple’s parental controls is that you need another Apple device to use them. Good old fashioned brand lock-in. No good reason you couldn’t manage this in a browser.
and this is why I’ll always choose Google over Apple. Despite Google’s flaws of surrepticiously killing their products. At least they don’t have these ridiculous walled garden that Apple has. See, for example, Google’s parental control app/solution: https://families.google/familylink/
Anyway, small side rant. I am a big big big advocate of parent’s doing their job as parents of setting up parental controls on devices their kids have access to. It is SO MUCH of a better option than the government requiring us adults to give up our privacy to verify that we are indeed adults to see adult content. Like, yes, I do want to see adult content. But hell no there’s no way in hell I’m violating my privacy with privacy invasive big brothery bullshit.
“Help keep your family safer online”
So you rather let Google track your whole family? You can’t say you care for privacy while using Google services, it’s a contradiction.
And their walled garden is even trying to DRM the web.
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A CEO said something? We better listen to them, they are a CEO! That’s important!
I had the same thought. Pretty weird headline. Business insider is weird.
I mean, it’s still a somewhat useful headline, though.
It tells us “a person who isn’t good with technology can’t use this feature”
So, we need to make the feature simpler, or not bother with it
This made me laugh for realz.
Either that or the kids found workarounds. I never had to deal with any of this myself, but I remember that being pretty common back in the day. Some you could even just ctrl+alt+del and close it in the task manager, do what you wanted, then open it back up to make it look like nothing had changed, though the parents would have to be technically competent to some degree to even check for that.
I think the systems these days are better but probably still aren’t foolproof. Decent chance one of the kids even shoulder surfed or otherwise figured out the password, or maybe just found the parent’s device unsecured and removed the limitations, which would be consistent with the claims of setting them one day then a few days later they are just gone.
Screen time limits hasn’t been working for months, have had several support cases in regards to it, debugging and logs sent to Apple and nothing.
Second to last time they actually admitted to having problems with the function (accidentally I am sure since I can bet money on that they aren’t allowed to admitting to faults).
Have just given up on the function now
It works on my 2 boys’ but not on my daughter’s. Good thing is she told me it wasn’t working and still followed the rules by not using it after a certain time of day. She’s a great kid. On the other hand, both of my boys would have totally abused it.
Precisely the same here gender wise!!
I do like the mix. My oldest is a boy, middle is a girl, youngest is a boy. Kind of lucked out. 😂
I have three kids. I am very present. I work from home and I’m constantly monitoring what they are using . Parental controls are a nightmare.
There are apps that are rated as ages 4+ but they have chat features.
There are apps you’ve ok’d them to use but requires the parents PIN every time they open it.
Screen limits randomly reset themselves. A lot of times that means you have allowed something that limit blocked and now you have to ok it again.
Imagine being out with three friends and you need to know everything they are doing on their phone and have to enter a password on it every 15 min.
Another annoying thing is if you approve an app from the App Store once, it’s approved for install forever.
Going off what you had mentioned about apps with chat features, we’ve run into times where we’ll approve the app thinking it’s fine, but then our kid finds out they can chat with random strangers and divulge personal information. At that point we delete the app, but they can reinstall it whenever they want without requiring parental approval again. 😬
Yup. Not to mention we have a Roku, iPhone, Chromebook, and Switch we have to manage, with three kids profiles on each.
Another thing, I have a 13 year old and a lot of apps (like YouTube) have little kid and adult.
When I was a kid and had cable there were lots of content edited for mass consumption. You could turn on TBS and watch an R movie edited down to somewhere between PG and PG-13. No one is editing down all this content now.
Oh no! Not a random CEO’s family!!
THE HORROR!!!
“a golfing buddy of someone senior at the newspaper who we didn’t want to just call ‘area man’”
Well they don’t care about problems until they affect their own families, so there’s that at least.
Maybe don’t give your kids a goddamn phone.
Be the parent and tell them no.