Apple leans into the Social Media Ban with new Parental Controls helping both parents and app developers

Apple has released a “white paper” titled “Helping Protect Kids Online” in which it outlines changes to it’s parental control systems and age ratings, and while it’s not directly linked to the changes in Australia’s legislation relating to the social media ban, the timing can’t be ignored.

This year the Family and Parental controls on Apple devices will be updated in several ways. Those include making it easier for parents to actually create the Child Accounts, basically streamlining the process for parents and also giving kids the option to setup their device if they are keen but automatically limiting what they can do until an account is fully created.

There are also new information cards within App listings in the App store to let you know if an app contains user-generated content, has advertising and what content controls exist within the app.

But at the core of these changes will be the Age Ratings and Age Range sharing.

Age ratings in the app store used to include 12+ and 17+ and those ratings aren’t any use to apps trying to restrict themselves to the 13+ and 16+ ages which are being so widely discussed in these new legislative changes.

The ratings will be updated to 4+, 9+, 13+, 16+ and 18+ across the App Store.

But critically, parents will now be able to provide consent within their parental controls for their child to share their age range within an app.

It’s not something we’ve seen yet, but EFTM understands the terminology of “age range” is used to ensure there’s no thought that your device might share your actual age. Instead, using a new Developer API called the “Declared Age Range API”, Apps can ask a user if they are Over 16 for example, a child can answer that and their answer is verified by the Age rating tool.

This ensures kids actual birth-dates are not shared, but allows users to confirm or choose their age range.

A non social media example of this might be for video content within an app, the app might ask the user to choose their age range, and the app can determine what age ranges it asks for, but the declaration check uses the child’s age to confirm this, without having to share the actual birth date.

This follows Apple’s long held Privacy stance, ensuring that Apple and indirectly Apps on their platforms can meet regulations around age usage, but user data is kept safe.

Of course, apps like TikTok and Instagram already ask for users birth-dates when creating accounts so we’re yet to see if that will change, and critically none of these controls will work if parent’s dont embrace the Family controls available across Apple devices.