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I'm curious about the new parental control features they announced at the same time as the iCloud photo scanning. My recollection is that when they withdrew the
by tzs 3y ago
I'm curious about the new parental control features they announced at the same time as the iCloud photo scanning. My recollection is that when they withdrew the iCloud scanning they also withdrew the new parental controls.
I'm curious why they also withdrew those. For those who don't remember the parental control, which were largely overshadowed by the controversy over the cloud stuff, they were to work like this:
1. If parents had enabled them on their child's device, they would scan incoming messages for sexual material. The scan would be entirely on-device. If such material was found the material would be blocked, the child would be notified that the the message contained material that their parents thought might be harmful, and asked if they wanted to see it anyway.
2. If the child said no, the material would be dropped and that would be the end of it. If the child said yes what happened next depended on the age of the child.
3. If the was at least 13 years old the material would be unblocked and that would be the end of it.
4. If the while was not yet 13 they would be given another warning that their parents think the material might be harmful, and again asked if they want to go ahead and see it. They would be told that if they say "yes" their parents will be notified that they viewed the material.
5. If they say no the material remains blocked and that is the end of it.
6. If they say yes it is unblocked, but their parents are told.
There wasn't a lot of discussion of this, and I only recall seeing one major privacy group object (the EFF, on the grounds that if it reaches step 6 it violates the privacy of the person sending sex stuff to your pre-teen because they probably did not intend for the parents to know).
- Shank 3y agoThe issue is that it’s predicated on an age field that can be set separately. It’s easy to use parental controls to control non-children by setting a lower age internally. Think victims of human trafficking or adults in odd relationship situations. Not quite the same but see: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2023/04/06/sex-traffickers-use-parenting-apps-like-life360-to-spy-on-victims/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2023/04/06/sex-t... Apple’s updated system allows children to ask for help from an adult using the Communication Safety features, which strikes a good balance to me.
- afavour 3y agoI imagine they’d withdraw it because it’s a total PR nightmare. “Apple knew my 14 year old was receiving sexual material and did nothing about it?!”
- dmvdoug 3y agoIt might’ve served the greater good of bringing home to parents that their kids are, in fact, old enough to be sexual beings and suppression of their sexuality just isn’t possible anymore. Maybe that would lead to fewer cases of kids like the one in my classroom yesterday, who had just learned at the ripe old age of 14 in the 9th grade that he was going to be a father. The proud mother will join him in high school next year, after she completes the 8th grade. If she completes it, I suppose.
- afavour 3y agoI don’t disagree with you at all but there’s zero chance a public tech company wants to be the face of educating youths about their sexual agency (with material out of their control, at that)
- judge2020 3y agoI believe they pulled that back as well, but now there is "Communication Safety" and "Sensitive Content Warning" available to everyone in iOS 17, coming out sometime on or after Sept 12: https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-17-preview/ https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-17-preview/ ctrl-f "Sensitive Content Warning"
- cutemonster 3y ago> if it reaches step 6 it violates the privacy of the person sending Let's say the parents are abusive, and someone wants to talk with the child about that (via chat, for some reason). Now, if the algorithms sometimes incorrectly flag private messages that were in fact safe -- could that be mitigated by letting the sender know: "Your message will be scanned and possibly shown to the parents of the recipient" before they hit Send? (O.t.o.h. that leaks info about the age of the recipient.)
- replygirl 3y agointroducing waze for predators
- withinboredom 3y agoThis feature is back in iOS 17, but it doesn’t do notifications and can be enabled per-device. It basically just blurs nsfw photos when they’re on the screen. It’s great when on a business trip and sexting with the SO. You can open your messages in front of your coworkers without having to worry about the messages being open from the night before.
- extraduder_ire 3y agoI would be far too worried about false-negatives to do that. Especially as they get rarer, and I'd become more confident about loading up images in public. Big fan of keeping different forms of content separate.
- godelski 3y agoI'm a bit confused here. This seems like failure analysis gives us a clear winning direction. When the system fails: would you rather a nude image show clear or a non-nude image be blurred? I think 99% of people would rather have the latter. There is little risk to a normal image being falsely flagged but the outcome is likely far worse when a nude image is not censored. It really surprises me a lot of times how little failure analysis is done in software engineering considering it is basically the cornerstone of most physical engineering. It is critical that you design systems to fail in certain ways. That is error messaging... (Also see Blackstone's Ratio for an example in law) Different forms for different content is a nice answer, but you also have to remember that we're talking a product for the masses. So while I don't think your answer is wrong, it is.