Apple has promised to fix a years-old bug in its parental controls that allows children to bypass restrictions and view adult content online.
The bug, by which a child could get around controls by simply entering a certain nonsense phrase into the address bar on Safari, was first reported to the company in 2021.
It has languished unfixed and this week a Wall Street Journal report drew fresh attention to the risk. Now Apple says a solution will be coming in the next update to iOS.
The loophole in effect disables the company’s Screen Time parental control system for Safari, allowing children who should be limited to a locked-down version of the web to access to anything they can think of.
Although it appears that the bug was not widely exploited, critics say the flaw – and its persistence – is emblematic of the lack of care provided by the company towards parents.
“As a parent who heavily relies on Screen Time to keep my kids safe and prevent them from staring at a screen all day, I agree that the whole service is super buggy, feels like an afterthought, and there seems to be loopholes around everything,” said Mark Jardine, an iOS developer. “And it’s been like this for over a decade.”
When it was launched in 2018, Screen Time was sold as doing double duties: helping parents keep tabs on their children’s device usage, and helping adults be more mindful about how they spend their own time.
In the years since its launch, it is the first group who have come to rely most heavily on the service. They can use it to lock features and apps away behind a passcode, limit children’s usage to certain hours of the day, or simply block them from a phone altogether.
The year after Screen Time launched, Apple began to crack down on third-party services that performed the same tasks. The company argued that it was a necessary security approach, since apps that can monitor screen time inherently have the sort of access that can also be used for more nefarious purposes. But Apple was criticised on competition grounds.
Five years on, critics argue that that lack of competition has resulted in Apple neglecting its parental controls. Dan Moren, an Apple blogger, said: “I’ve heard from plenty of other parents who’ve found Screen Time frustrating and full of loopholes. And this is after Apple started pruning third-party parental control apps from its iOS store.”
Apple said: “We take reports of issues regarding Screen Time very seriously and have been consistently making improvements to ensure users have the best experience. Our work is not done and we will continue to make updates in upcoming software releases.”