Apple will roll out a new suite of child-safety parental controls that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says were partly inspired by Australia.
During the annual Worldwide Developers Conference in California today, Apple announced some new additions to its pre-existing parental controls, many of which offered a strong solution for parents concerned about social media.
Apple’s new child-safety parental controls are being rolled out. Apple
These include the ability to require parental permission to access new websites or read a message sent by a new contact.
Apple chief executive Tim Cook called Albanese to brief him on the changes.
Albanese said Cook had been partly inspired by Australia’s social media ban that took effect in December and resulted in the removal of 5 million accounts.
“I welcome this announcement, and I am proud of the world-leading work Australia is doing to fight for a safer online world for our children,” Albanese said in a statement.
“Mr Cook invited me to visit Apple the next time I am in the United States to see this technology in action, and I plan to take up that offer so we can keep learning how best to protect our kids.”
Today’s announcement expands on Apple’s existing parental controls, which allow parents to set downtime for their kids’ devices and limit apps by time and require parental permission to download new apps.
The problem is, not all parents enable these features.
Parents can approve their child’s access to apps, websites and contacts. Apple
Any parent has been able to limit their child’s access to social media apps by preventing their download or setting time limits for their use. But did they?
So Apple’s new features are only a huge leap forward for parents if they choose to take the time to set them up.
Apple says it is making the features easier to set up, providing vastly more information to parents and having more information online for parents interested in the controls.
However, again, it requires a parent to be deeply active in their child’s digital life for this to work.
Perhaps the best announcement of them all was one around communication safety.
If a child receives or attempts to send a message that may contain nudity, the system will automatically blur the content; the same applies to any gore or violent content in both Messages and FaceTime.
These new parental controls, including new time allowances for app categories, will be available to parents when iOS 27 and the family of updates are available across Apple devices later this year.
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