tThose with kids who use this, do these restrictions on porn and violent sites actually work in practice? I have Safari turned off for my kids except for a small subset of child friendly sites, but my daughter is getting older and I’ve considered giving her more access since she seems to take after me being a jack of all trades and wanting to learn how to do almost everything.
But I also grew up on the unrestricted web and know how dangerous it is and that I’m lucky I was smart enough to regulate myself surprisingly well. I also grew up bypassing a lot of the overly restrictive content filters in my school. So I’m curious if this actually works?
I bit on that $200 off iPad Air 5th gen deal from earlier today and got both my kids new iPads to setup coming soon, and I’d like to review a lot of the parental control settings. I might also setup some parental controls on my router, or perhaps see if I can route traffic from their MAC addresses through my Raspberry Pi 4 and filter it there as a backstop. But I worry about when they’re connected to WiFi at friends and family’s houses. I really need to look into profiles and what can be done with regard to restrictions based on WiFi connection. Idk much about it or what is possible.
I don’t know if you've explored profiles in the meantime, but id really recommend it as a solution.
I don't know if I'm allowed to self-promote here, hopefully it's ok, because I'm trying to offer help on this issue. I have a book on the Apple Books store called 'A dumb iPhone?' which explores profiles and the rigidity of a solution that can come with these.
I gave up with screen time some while ago and I agree with the prevailing sentiment here, but I do have to say that potentially I had my feedback answered. The solution in my book became even more rigid when Apple introduced a change to VPN/DNS behaviour in iOS 18 which aligned with my feedback. I didnt see any other reports of this issue anywhere and I did have to submit quite a few feedback reports over many months, but a positive change was implemented in the end.
EDIT: I thought I’d updated my book for iOS 18 changes, but doesn’t seem to have saved or something. Anyway, iOS 18 now makes one device restriction work better. The restriction (configured from Apple Configurator) is ‘preventVPNcreation’. Enabling this used to prevent the user from bypassing the enforced DNS by inputting their own VPN credentials, but it didn’t stop third party VPN apps from bypassing the DNS. Users could simply install one of the thousands of VPN apps and get round the restrictions imposed by their company, parents, better selves etc. Now this restriction prevents third party VPN apps from establishing VPN connections as well, so if you, like I describe in the book, enforce a DNS with content blocking and in effect throw away the key (in reality hide in a time-locked safe), there’s no way around the restrictions.
Want to remove DNS from device? You can’t without the password.
Want to temporarily use a different DNS which allows all content? You can’t.
Want to try wiping the device to remove the enforced DNS? You’ll need a different password.
Want these passwords?
You’ll need to wait weeks for your safe to unlock, which will relock automatically in a matter of minutes.
Hope this clarifies things and helps.
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