Apple’s new operating system for the iPhone, iOS 12.0.1, contains a new “Parental Controls” feature that supposedly allows parents—or anyone—to block objectionable and offensive content online, so that kids who use their phones to search the internet will not be exposed to material that their parents would rather they not see. But according to new research by the popular sex education site O.School, the controls are set to block educational information about sexuality—but they allow violent, abusive and even neo-Nazi sites to reach kids’ eyeballs.
The site first discovered the anomaly when one of its employees attempted a search for dulce de leche, a caramel-like Latin American dessert made from sweetened milk. But apparently because leche can be used as Spanish slang for “semen,” the iOS parental filter blocked the recipe search.
So the site investigated further and found searches for such terms as "sex ed," "is masturbation normal?" "how to report sex abuse" and even "gay teen suicide hotline" were “restricted” by Apple’s new parental control system. In fact, O.School also discovered that its own, entire site was blocked by the iOS system.
While blocking useful information about human sexuality, alone, would be a curious function of a parental control system, the O.School research also found an even more egregious feature of the “parental controls.” According to Apple, kids should not see information from such publications as Teen Vogue, but the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, which bills itself as “The #1 Rape-Legalization Website” is perfectly acceptable, going unblocked by the parental controls.
While the query, “how do I say no to sex?” is blocked, according to the O.School study, “how do I rape a woman?” is freely accessible. The phrase “cunt punch” is unfiltered, while “teen pregnancy” is censored. And so on.
The tech site Motherboard followed up with research of its own—and the Motherboard findings confirmed the O.School study. Motherboard attempted to contact Apple to inquire about how the parental controls determine which sites and searches to block, but had not received a comment back as of Friday afternoon.
Both sites also found what appears to a clear bias in the parental controls against sexual information for women and girls—while male-oriented sexual info was allowed. For example, information responding to the question, “how do I jerk off?” was allowed—and produced a top result titled “Masturbation Matters: 15 Better Ways to Get Off.” But a search for “what is a vibrator” produced a “restricted” page.
Similarly, the phrase “blow job” was searchable, but “pussy eating” was not. A search for “cunt” produced results, but “dick” was blocked. And perhaps most absurdly, a search for “Kim Kardashian nipples” produced a long page of image results—but a search for “Kanye dick pic” was blocked.
“This isn’t some neutral act—if you’re cutting off resources for gay kids, blocking information about puberty and assault reporting, you’re ACTIVELY hurting children,” O.School founder Andrea Barrica wrote. “We can fix this—in fact, as a sex educator and tech entrepreneur, I’d love nothing more than to help the Apple team get it right. But we need to let Apple know that this isn’t acceptable.”
Photo by Qwertyxp2000 / Wikimedia Commons
