How Apple's Screen Time is outsmarted by kids, frustrating parents
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
This is a bit of an inflammatory comparison, but I stayed up reading with a flashlight a lot as a kid. Was that terrible for me? Should my flashlight have had a setting to limit the times I can use it? Would anyone say I had an unhealthy book addiction, and that publishers should do something about it?
I do agree that it is absolutely not Apple's responsibility to do anything about this. People want to outsource their responsibility as parents and it's pathetic.
As a parent, I'm taking responsibility for my kids' time and development by making sure the Skinner box is turned off until homework and chores are completed. I don't feel that's outsourcing my work as a parent - it's just one more tool in my toolbox among many.
You may disagree and you're raising your own kids differently, and that's just fine.
A technological solution seems perfectly reasonable in that context - and Apple has blocked some third party apps from the store so putting more of an onus on them to fill in the missing capabilities seems reasonable.
The parents who don’t want to parent are probably perfectly happy handing youtube to their kids and not monitoring or managing the usage at all.
> They search for bugs that make it easy to keep using their phones, unbeknown to parents, like changing the time to trick the system, or using iMessage to watch YouTube videos. “These are not rocket science, backdoor, dark web sort of hacks,” says Chris McKenna, founder of the Internet safety group Protect Young Eyes. “It blows me away that Apple hasn’t thought through the fact that a persistent middle school boy or girl can bang around and find them.”
And yeah, it’s not that Apple hasn’t thought about this or that fixing these kinds of bugs would take more than a day or few to fix.
The issue is Apple only implemented this feature to head off shareholder criticism, not because it believes it. Apple is not incentivized to make its products less addictive.
You mean, other than what is clearly explained in the article?
“In early 2018, a pair of major shareholders urged Apple’s board of directors to do something about youth screen addiction... Nine months later, Apple launched Screen Time”
> and also zero insight into what incentivizes Apple
Would you care to provide any counter evidence or insights of your own, or do you generally prefer defending your position via ad hominen attacks?
It's _extremely_ unlikely that Screen Time went from nothing to launch in nine months. It's a deceptively complex feature that requires support throughout the OS as well its own foreground and background components. Between product design, prioritizing, development, and testing, they'd probably been exploring the idea for several _years_ before that shareholder pressure appeared.
Did they maybe rush the work out early because of the growing pressure? I'd buy that. To me, being pressured to rush it out would even explain some of the rough edges discussed in the article without having to assume Apple was reluctant.
I can't know if I'm right, but neither can you or the article's authors. It turns out that there are quite a few ways to make sense of all the facts that are out there, and any final conclusions we draw probably just emerge from our own biases.
That’s highly unlikely given the number of people working there.
Clearly you haven’t done professional software development before. There are so many big misses.
It’s as if they designed a food delivery app and forgot to let the user enter the delivery address.
YouTube kids is a load of algorithmic content farm generated garbage. There is no trust based system for ranking content by quality (pagerank anyone?). Apple parental control is category specific, limits cannot be set for individual apps, nor can ad hoc categories be created.
Netflix has the same perverse incentives that default to the most addictive, garbage content and no whitelist option. Totally irresponsible and greed driven.
All three companies are dragging their feet, it is hard to tell if it’s due to greed, negligence or both.
Sadly, Amazon is the market leader in 2019 for kid friendly content and parental control options.
From your comment: "fixing these kinds of bugs would take more than a day or few to fix"
No way it's that easy. These hacks span multiple apps, factory resets, etc.
Also, this is all expected - just like all other parts of internet security, it's going to be a cycle of hacks and patches.
You seem to have missed the first line of my comment about these not being hacks but straight up obvious bugs "like changing the time to trick the system, or using iMessage to watch YouTube videos".
There’s a fairly complex interaction between Screen Time (settings controlling how often various features can be used), Down Time (settings controlling when various features can be used), Restrictions (settings controlling which settings the user of the device can change), various convenience features that pierce holes in that (ability to make photographs/send messages from the home screen, for example), and various cross-app capabilities (it wouldn’t surprise me if iBooks could be made to play videos inside e-books, for example) that, IMO, make it non-trivial to implement this in a way that makes it work perfectly as Parental Controls without leading to “but why doesn’t this work? I told the phone that application X was permitted” surprises.
If I enabled Screen Time for myself, the best answer might be ‘yes’. If I enabled it for my kid, it might be ‘no’.
I would argue that Apple is deliberately not fixing these holes because they prefer having people hooked on their devices. I'm not arguing that this is a good or bad thing, merely that higher engagement is obviously good for business.
Apple seems to have found the balance it wants with its current solution - paying lip service to the vocal shareholders, while allowing its customers to easily work around the restrictions.
I also played a lot of video games, and if I played more than a couple of hours in a row my dad would come and just unplug the Nintendo. Drove me nuts (saved games on those old cartridges were very finicky), but it made me go outside.
Unfortunately there's no way that would ever happen. Even if Apple PR would ever allow such a statement to be made, which it wouldn't, requiring parents to do some actual parenting might provoke major unrest.
Fair enough, you admitted it at least.
>but I stayed up reading with a flashlight a lot as a kid. Was that terrible for me? Should my flashlight have had a setting to limit the times I can use it? Would anyone say I had an unhealthy book addiction, and that publishers should do something about it?
Did it mess with your cognitive abilities? Your self-esteem? Your self-image? Your limbic system, in general? No? Your dopamine receptors, then? Did it fill every minute of your waking life with escapism? Would anyone read while driving? Or during class, meals, family gatherings, dates, meetings, at the movies? You get the point.
I think the unhealthy potential of smartphones differs tremendously from that of books, just because of their inherent physical qualities and limitations.
Unpopular opinion: I would be less preoccupied of a teen watching porn at 2am than on watching clips of videogames
Imagine how silly I would sound if I said “It’s not Apple’s job to sysadmin your users” in response to priceless not working properly on user accounts.
So while parenting support, or whatever, isn’t that important to me, functioning audit and access controls really is.
We grew up as hackers and thought we could end around the problem of kids removing safe guards to our software. What we quickly found was that (surprising no one at all, least of all us) kids have way more time on their hands and are willing to expend way more energy to remove blockers than parents do to enforce them.
It's a tricky issue - kids and online. We actively encouraged parents to have dialog with their kids about what they were doing online. The issue we were attempting to solve was keeping bad people out of the child's social networks. All of the other solutions were, and still do, focus on keeping porn off the computer. That's a doomed system. Parents need to be involved and have a on-going dialog. I believed it when we founded IMSafer 13 years ago, and I believe it now (as a parent with 3 kids, two of them teenagers).
Our service did a lot of very novel things for the time (machine based analysis of chat conversations looking for patterns of predation), but I continue to be amazed at how much energy we put into the "but my kids keep uninstalling it" problem. We came up with some pretty good solutions, which were P95 effective, but (again, surprising no one on the technical team) the kids who figured out how to circumvent came up with some pretty amazing solves.
The most impressive was this one kid who basically took over their parent's account, gave themselves admin access, set their parents to minimal access, but then changed specific .exe file pointers to give the parents the perception that they still had admin access to their machine when they were trying to run applications.
this this this.
limiting screen time isn't a technical issue, it's an economic issue - kids and parents have different levels of effort they're willing to expend to deal with these limits. Ultimately the kid needs to incentivized to conform to the limit set by the parent.
As an example of how not-sneaky I was as a kid, I immediately ran to my dad and showed him how I got the password.
Come to think of it, I have even played a video game about it, called "Mom hid my game!"
I salute their ingenuity as a triumph of the human spirit in its unstoppable quest for freedom, justice, and Minecraft for all. Though I suppose drug addicts are similarly clever...
Technology changes, kids don't.
rules are meant to be broken
- every kid with enough determination in the history of mankind
Interestingly, corporations have more ways to restrict device usage than parents, by adding a profile and changing the device to 'supervised'.
School has wifi with content blocking, and many students BYOD. Teachers can override the content blocker on a one-time basis by typing in an override password on a student's device.
So a student puts a keylogger on his own device, navigates to a page that he should be allowed to access, but which the content blocker flags, and he gets the teacher to enter the override password. Thanks to the keylogger, now he has it too. Kids are sneaky!
EG: At 11PM, the phone goes into basic mode. It can only call the list of pre-defined numbers (parents/family) and emergency services.
Maybe give a 30 15 and 5 minute count-down warning that way the user can gracefully finish their activities currently at hand.
”Think of this as a nap for your screen time. When you schedule downtime in Settings, only phone calls and apps that you choose to allow are available. Downtime applies to all of your Screen Time-enabled devices, and you get a reminder five minutes before it starts.”
I don’t think you can restrict what numbers can be called.
Funny, I told myself I'd be more open when I was an adult and here we all are, doing the same thing.
Now there's an incentive for them to learn electrical engineering.