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miohtama

Here is a 2-minute tutorial video on how to turn on parental controls on an iPhone.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tv6vxRBEa2o

Instead of asking parents to do this, you get these laws where you need to show your id to unlock your own device.

Clearly.

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This is a garbage UI and it looks like it was designed using "dark patterns" to ensure that nobody uses it. Look how many clicks (18 clicks, I counted) one needs to do in the correct sequence without a single mistake, and how many distracting and misleading options are there. It is a sabotage, it is a rebellion. Technically, yes, Apple can claim that they have "safe mode", but in practice it is unusable. Apple clearly doesn't want parents to enable restrictions, for reasons I do not understand, probably they just hate children or people having a family.

Your video actually has the opposite effect: it shows that there are no (easy) ways for parents to protect the children and government regulation is necessary.

The UI should be a single checkbox named "child mode" and small, gray link "configure" that opens the menu from the video. The parent just clicks the checkbox, and sets up a password, a fingerprint or paired device to unlock the mode. That's all. After this only government-approved apps and websites can be opened (parent may edit the white list if they are ok with navigating through a maze of ten thousand menus) and children are perfectly safe. Government may white-list only apps and sites that implement measures for content safety and may not add non-compliant apps.

Also I hate watching vertical videos on a laptop.

I use Apple's parental controls daily and it is complete garbage. Unfortunately it's also the best (less bad?) of everything I tried.

My kids' devices consistent get confused about how long the device/specific apps has been used, and changing things is a lot of work, and at the same time not granular enough.

> Apple clearly doesn't want parents to enable restrictions

Hard not to come to the same conclusion.

I have used both Google's FamilyLink and later iPhone's ScreenTime parental controls. Google's implementation of parental controls is way superior to Apple's. FamilyLink tracks multiple devices, has easy settings for daily screen time limits, has school time downtime schedules, and has per-app time limits that cannot be bypassed, unlike Apple's implementation which can be bypassed with the tap of a button.

I really like Google's FamilyLink, unfortunately my child's friend group all have iPhones and rely on FaceTime for social interaction, which made my child demand an iPhone as the primary phone.

EDIT: It looks like I just haven't correctly configured Apple's ScreenTime to remove the bypasses [0]. Yay for unhelpful default settings.

[0]: https://www.airdroid.com/ios-parental/how-kids-bypass-iphone...

> Also I hate watching vertical videos on a laptop.

Consider getting a mobile phone

Does it actually work? Does it block porn sites while allowing access to educational sites?

It's not only about blocking access to porn websites but children can access whatsapp groups where child predators are. Why can children access this content in those communication apps? It sounds like providers of these platforms must prevent children accessing those becquse children need to use such platforms to coordinate on their assignments and homeworks. This can be solved by having a "children-type" device account as someone else suggested. The app would know a child is using it and block access. No government id needed.

Famously these controls basically don’t work.

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