Some Apple users say its parental controls aren't working properly. A CEO who has 4 kids called it 'frustrating.'

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

Don't rely on Silicon Valley to babysit your child. All software has flaws, and a kid who wants to watch more YouTube videos will figure out a way because there's probably a dozen videos out there detailing each bug.

V-Chips didn't do shit in my era, and we found ways around Bess, so none of this surprises me.

Do you have kids? I can tell you as a parent that parental controls are godsend.
If I were to try to do the same myself, it would be 10-15 arguments a day. When the software does it, there is no argument or very little. Sometimes they ask for more, and I can evaluate their case. Much better than chasing them around trying to tear the iPad out of their hands.
All that being said, I've had to use other 3rd party software because Apple's parental controls are buggy and unreliable.
- My 5 year old is already sneaky enough that when I put him on starfall he will wait for me to get distracted and chnage tabs and type gibberish into search, or click the YouTube icon in chrome and do the same (which is more dangerous, YouTube has some really weird shit if you search special characters).
  I alsready have dns controls on network etc and generally manage access by physically retaining control of a device. M
  But as they get older adding some level of content filter that’s https aware may be needed.
  Though as an IT admin I’ll try and rely on trust and communication over technology solutions. But still. Like borderline planning to dump them on their own vlan, with a Pi-hole and some extra filters, that also goes to Cisco umbrella and some sort of squid guard/sensei setup on my opnsense router or even websense or palo alto filter.
- Can confirm “the limit is the limit” 🤷‍♂️ works WAY better than “because I said so.”
- Software can be very helpful for all sorts of situations. However, that doesn’t mean you get to abdicate all responsibility.
  The person you are responding to is simply noting that kids are not stupid and often find ways to get around parental controls. There are also ways for content to get around controls while complying with controls. It’s unfortunate Apple’s software is buggy, it should be better.
How can the kid watch videos on how to watch more videos when they are blocked from watching videos?
- "Hmm.... I wonder if Mom's password to unlock the iPad is the same as her pin code for..... holy shit is she really this stupid!?"
  Or if that's not enough, here's my lazy attempt to see what the options are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZaMNsGSvRE
  Imagine if I put more than 10 seconds of thought into this.
- My kid doesnt have a smartphone. But he has access to our family pc, for gaming and music.
  But no video. I blocked the browser and youtube completely
The alternative solution is to not give your kid a phone at all. Having been down the cat and mouse games with blocking, I can tell you that’s the only thing that works. The problem is that most schools require technology use, paper maps and public phones are non-existent, social pressure, etc. Pinwheel is the most nerfed smartphone for parents who want to limit their kids phone use but it’s a weird subset of Android, doesn’t nicely fit into Apple ecosystems, but effective if you need that.

Why are the opinions of some random CEO of a company that isn't even named even in this article? It is irrelevant and doesn't even make me want to read the article.

The assumption is that CEOs are smart. In reality that's not always the case. The person the article mentioned could be a total nut job lol I think that pillow guy is a CEO right? Did they ask him what he thought about it?
- I've read stories about IT/security people setting up a good secure system and then being told by some c-suite executive that it's too hard and to either give them an exception that might allow them to reuse some simple password or maybe walk it back to a less secure system for everyone.
  Edit: plus on internet forums, anyone can be a CEO. I'm not a CEO but I am a space admiral and if any news outlet wants to quote me for this or any other post, I insist they refer to me as "an annonymous space admiral".

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'"

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.

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. 😬
- You need to do this on their device, but you can go to the App Store, then purchase history and “hide” it. This makes them ask for approval to redownload.
- 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.

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

They were amazing for years and switched from push notifications to iMessage and broke everything, used to work to allow from Apple Watch, now that function appears to work but doesn't do anything
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!!

Do some parenting? Not just leave them alone with gadgets if you don’t want them on them all day.

There are involved parents who still want to use parental controls. It's not like everyone who uses the controls is relying solely on them. It's not an all-or-nothing proposition.
- Oh I agree. I guess my points was not to rely on parental controls, and also generally know when it’s time to say it’s been enough screen time for the day.
Do you have kids?
- Yes. Which is why I posted what I posted.
- You’re going to need a more original/thoughtful response. I have kids and I think like this person. I don’t trust parental controls, kids and content creators know how to get around them. I, personally, think it is idiotic to assume parental controls do more than present a barrier to content, not usually a blocker.
  What happens when your kids use other devices without parental controls at a friend’s house or school? Will your kids know about being responsible with content and how to navigate to safe spaces, or are they just going to go totally wild?
  So, yes, I do have kids and no I do not blindly trust parental controls of any sort. Just want you to pack up that argument right now. Real annoying when parents think they can discredit a viable view because the person they are talking to hasn’t had a crotch goblin.
- This.

Maybe don't give your kids a goddamn phone.

Be the parent and tell them no.

Seriously. Parental controls are no substitute for being a parent. They're not too difficult to circumvent, anyway; just ask 10-year-old me.

Expecting technology to raise your kids is one of the key reasons humanity is on the downward trend intellectually. How about actually spend time with your kids teaching them right from wrong rather than expecting a multi billion dollar corporation that actively uses child and slave labour to build its products to raise your child for you. Always find these types of articles to be brilliantly hilarious. "I'm a CEO, someone else or something else needs to raise my kids!"

parental controls across the board are an afterthought by these companies at best, even if the product is geared toward children. Internet is off on thier devices and they have a growing, curated intranet to enjoy.

That's a typical layer-8 problem. #pebkac

The mainstream tech/software industry was built on abusive tactics and nonfree software. The only thing I can recommend to people is to de-productize their computers and try to use free software whenever possible.

Even if you control what a child sees/uses on a apple device, you're still perpetuating the injustice of apple's products and now setting up that child to use their products in the future. In essence, you're stripping the child's software freedom in the end.

The youth of the generations after us need to be educated on their fundamental software freedoms, and how the loss of those freedoms leads to endangerment.

You may feel fine forfeitting your software freedom, but it's an injustice to do that onto others especially preteens and teens.

What a hassle. Might actually have to be a present parent in your child's life. 😰

Do you have kids?
- Just going to follow you through the thread to remind you that a person who doesn’t have kids isn’t immediately unknowledgeable about a subject. That’s some parent gatekeeping bullshit so that you, as a parent, don’t have to think critically when being challenged.
  Source: I have kids so apparently they that’s all that matters to you.
- Whether or not I do, they won't be "raised" by slipping into a YouTube Kids coma 24/7 unsupervised.