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Persistent Kids Finding Loopholes in Apple's Screen Time Limits
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Yeah but they should’ve mentioned at least one in the article for context given it’s the entire subject of it.
That you know of.
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Easier to track kids, I imagine, short of GPS chipping them, of course.
It’s not even for just a phone - I wanted this when my kids all got iPod Touches (and got ripped here on MR for wanted to restrict things on them - how dare I limit anything, full access or nothing 🙄 oh and that kid is 23 now and totally gets why I did what I did). Schools today are pushing electronic schedules and assignments - they need devices to do certain assignments on.
The worst offender in my house is my special needs 20yo. She needs them, but dang if I can get her phone to do it. That fine line of “adult vs permanent middle schooler”. She is the screen time craving hyena.
so you don’t need them, scroll on by - it’s a tool some might need, and those people deserve to have tools that work. Apple should be embarrassed that Amazon passed them up in this area too.
The worst offender in my house is my special needs 20yo. She needs them, but dang if I can get her phone to do it. That fine line of “adult vs permanent middle schooler”. She is the screen time craving hyena.
so you don’t need them, scroll on by - it’s a tool some might need, and those people deserve to have tools that work. Apple should be embarrassed that Amazon passed them up in this area too.
Technology will never replace a present parent that is actually trying to parent and not use a smart device as a permanent baby sitter.
Kids circumventing computer parental controls, a tale as old as time. In this case, just not giving your kid an iPhone sounds like a better option, for unrelated reasons.
I found the original article before I found this post on Macrumors. Seriously this is the silliest non-problem ever. Your kid keeps defeating parental controls? And you don't know what to do? FFS.
First offense: "You knew the rules, and you broke them. Hand me back the iPhone/iPad. You're not to touch it for a week. In a week, I'll consider letting you use it again. After that, if you do it again, it'll be considerably more than a week before you get to use the device again. If ever."
First offense: "You knew the rules, and you broke them. Hand me back the iPhone/iPad. You're not to touch it for a week. In a week, I'll consider letting you use it again. After that, if you do it again, it'll be considerably more than a week before you get to use the device again. If ever."
This attitude is the reason why kids tend to go covert, if you don't work with kids then how will they be open with you? The power of screen time isn't the absolute control, but the level of detail you can show your kid to agree on the the right balance of control. My kids have had safe access to devices since they were 4, with increasing levels of access until now when they have their own iPhones. They are good online citizens and are quite open about what others do, the issue is parents not engaging with kids (the amount of parents that still have their DoB on the iDevices is staggering).
The power of the Apple ecosystem is that the devices tend to still be supported for OS updates after the parent has paid the contract off, so having screen time is a useful bonus. The issue is that they bound it to the restrictions service rather than ask to buy which has meant that it's still reliant on a 4-digit PIN.
I agree with others that if they created a ParentKit that allowed the existing vendors such a Circle, Netnanny etc to interact with the O/S properly then that'd be fine but they haven't.
To make this robust, this is easy:
- Pay $30k to a security testing company to find the main flaws
- Allow the same password options as you have to access the iPhone/iPad
- A child account has screen time enabled by default and all apps respect the stated age of the child
- Create ParentKit to allow API access to the screen time
- Allow temporary limits for the entire device and/or app categories (for when you have long haul flights)
While I do think this is a legitimate complaint, the first thing I'd do if my sons were doing this is talk to them about it. One warning and the phone gets taken away.
I choose to give them phones for entertainment purposes. They don't take them to school and they do get taken away as needed for discipline. Generally speaking they're pretty motivated not to push thing s to the point the phone gets taken.
I choose to give them phones for entertainment purposes. They don't take them to school and they do get taken away as needed for discipline. Generally speaking they're pretty motivated not to push thing s to the point the phone gets taken.
I reported the messages->youtube extension loophole when Screen Time was first introduced in a beta. They marked the case resolved and when I tested it, it was still there. I can't believe a company would just mark something like that as resolved. Terrible software development management. To this day, that case is still open.
What?! Your not outraged that Apple refuses to raise you kids for you? After what they charged for that phone, they should not only do that, but provide and education for them.
Look, if your kids are more tech savvy than you, don’t be surprised when they find a way around limits you put for them. Do you SERIOUSLY not remember being in middle school? Ok. Let me spell it out.
They are 10-17 year olds who are much more concerned about their phones than you ever were. They do not have to worry about a job, or bills, or anything but their screen time. Every limit you place is THE APOCALYPSE (I am purposely de-emphasizing that because a 150 point font would be obnoxious) so they are highly motivated to get around it, and they communicate with each other. If one of them finds a solution, they ALL have it.
Actually try your hand at engagement.
haha to the done with classwork bit.
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They are kids, they have no 'need' for the phone. I agree that they should have time to learn the stuff, but maybe the solution is to just limit the time they have the device in their hand. They can't work around not having the phone in their hand during family time, or dinner. Other than that, who cares if it's their favorite toy they play with a lot. There are lots of parenting solutions to this.
A HUGE one is that kids can simply go in and change the phone's clock. I discovered my teenager doing this. That setting is *supposed* to be able to be locked or not changeable but it's wide open.
Did you pay over 1.000$ for the device? YES
Does it work as intended? NO
Is it complicated rocket science? NO?
Do you have kids?
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It's WinRar all over again
But in this case from what I understand they are not going around limits due to tech-unsavvy parents misconfiguring the device.
They are able to go around limitations because apparently they are more tech savvy than the bloody Apple engineers which designed the limitations in the first place...
Either they are super-tech-savvy kids, or Apple engineers failed big time.
How do you set limits on a single app? I've only ever seen it on app "categories", and if you don't pay attention (Twitch is in the Creative category, not Entertainment), you're not limiting what you think you are.
Nobody expects it to be an electronic babysitter. Parents want to limit screen time. Sure, we could follow our kids around all day with a notepad and keep track of their screen time, but doesn't it just make sense to let the device count the time for us? I think all of us bought these devices to make our lives easier.
A technology enthusiast website is a strange place to question why people want to use technology
If parents could set an iDevice to report the accumulated time that each app was used (even if it's deleted and reinstalled or the clock is changed), and parents could look up those results in their own iCloud account (not the child's account), then parents could monitor app usage and screen time after-the-fact. That should give them enough oversight to provide guidance or apply discipline as their parenting style dictates. Preventing kids from using an app or a feature is hard, judging by Apple's lack of success. Reporting that they did use an app or feature would presumably be much easier.
You can wipe your device and set it up again without those pesky restrictions.
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Having used OSX parental controls, this doesn’t surprise me at all. I had to downgrade several versions before finding one where turning on parental controls didn’t cause mail.app to crash after simply being open for a few minutes. It’s like they didn’t test it AT ALL. This bug went unfixed for several years at least (not sure if it has been fixed. I reported it to Apple, but haven’t been willing to upgrade just to see if they fixed it.) Only one of a myriad of problems I’ve had with it.
