Apple Announces New iOS Child Safety Features, Which Will Roll Out This Fall

Parents today spend a huge chunk of time worrying about their kids’ online safety. How much social media access is enough to connect with friends, but not so much it becomes addicting? Is their phone making it easier to get help when they are feeling stressed, or driving them away from human connection? So when tech companies make it easier for moms and dads to put boundaries around screen time and what content their children can access, it’s just another tool in the toolbox for keeping our kids safe online. And last week, Apple announced some new features for kids and families that parents will want to know about.

At their annual Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple debuted a host of new safety and security features built into iOS, meaning they’re available on iPads and iPhones alike. The new features are in beta testing now and will begin rolling out to users this fall. Here’s the DL on all the new settings and what the iPhone manufacturer says they can help with:

• Child Accounts: When setting up your child’s device, you’ll want to create a Child Account, now required for kids under 13 and available until age 18. This enables all the other safeguards now built into iOS, and will prompt parents to create a unique PIN code to confirm updates to the settings in the future.
• More control over apps and content: Parents can add apps to their child’s Allowed Apps, and enable Ask to Buy, which sends a text to the parent’s device to approve or deny any apps when the child attempts to download them. Then there’s Ask to Browse, which requires that kids ask permission to access a new website in Safari.
• Added security around who kids can talk to: Parents can now manage who their children can connect with over the phone, via FaceTime, and in Messages, and require them to ask for approval before accepting communications from a new contact. Also, the Communication Safety feature — which already blurs nudity when detected in FaceTime or Messages — will now censor violence and gore as well. This is turned on by default for users under 18.
• When kids can access what is now in your hands. The new Time Allowances feature gives parents more flexibility when setting up screen time limits for their kids. The menu provides expert guidance around how much time is recommended for children across entertainment, games, and social media apps so you don’t feel like you’re guessing at what’s right. You can also set schedules to manage which apps kids can access at what times of day, all week long. If you need to turn off all the things during school hours, now you can.
• Screen Time makes managing access easier: You can view which apps your child used most that day and how many minutes they spent on each, easily blocking access or adding more time from that menu.

If you have kids with tablets and phones, you’ve probably used the parental controls in iOS already and may have experienced some bugs, like the settings toggling off at random. This can happen when even a single device in your Family Sharing network is not running the latest software update, as they all talk to each other to reinforce those safety settings, according to Apple.

During a press briefing, an Apple spokesperson says they restructured the backend of their parental controls quite a bit before making these updates in order to shut down old pathways allowing kids to disable the controls themselves. Now, even if your child learns your passcode and uses it to bypass the Ask to Browse feature, for example, a notification is sent to the parent’s device to inform them that it’s time to change their passcode and talk to their child.

Apple also created a new hub for parents to find answers to their questions about all the security features at their disposal and how to implement them at apple.com/child-safety.