Your kids probably have a phone or tablet, and that opens them to the potential of explicit material. What are your options to stop this from happening?
The internet can be crazy for adults, but imagine the drama for kids: content everywhere and no obvious ratings, it’s not always going to be easy to work out what’s G for General Audiences and what’s M for Mature.
Some of it is obvious, but look around a corner and you might not want to see what’s there. There’s no Office of Film and Literature Classifications or other classifications body for life, and you have to just use your best judgement, something that is always evolving and getting better as you grow older.
For kids and teens, this can be a problem. Not only do they have to deal with a scourge of scammers and nefarious individuals doing horrible things, but it’s also happening as they’re growing curious about the world, and beginning to go exploring without fully understanding just what is going on. It’s hard enough for adults, but kids and teens may see more than they bargained for.
The internet is rife with stories of sexting and sexploitation and bullying and so on. It can feel like sheer chaos at times. Results can be difficult for kids and teens, and downright concerning for parents, especially as they tried to maintain a balance between real life and life in the digital world.
Technology is an unmistakeable and integral part of our lives, and definitely a part of theirs, evident because of just how interconnected it is between everything. How do parents straddle the balance while still providing protection as their kids learn and grow?
For that, they might want to turn to technology, and to the controls provided by the makers of these devices, offering a link between your phone and theirs, and attempting to provide parenting features inside of an app of sorts.
Offering a variation of remote control largely because the control is remote, digital parenting options can be useful at times, though can vary based on how heavy a parent wants to control blocking access to unwanted media.
Apple’s approach: obscure and reach out
You may not realise it, but the iPhone and iPad have built-in solutions to deal with unwanted nudity, as well as restricting access to nudity and pornography for younger ages. The feature joins regular app controls, which affords parents the ability to not only monitor how much time is being spent on apps, but to tighten the apps and websites kids and teens are allowed to visit.
Included as part of its family controls, Apple’s “Communication Safety” essentially applies an approach that not only checks incoming images for nudity, but gives kids a series of obstacles, and a way to notify parents and guardians if they’re not sure.
For instance, when we sent a series of NSFW test images intended to nudge image blocking systems, the images were immediately blurred in Apple’s Messages app on the test child’s iPhone. On the other hand, images intended to be provocative but lacked any real nudity were shown. The system worked, and was flagged media properly.
From there, unlocking a risqué image and removing the blur offers a series of steps and/or obstacles depending on your perspective.
For kids unsure of an image, they’re given the option to message their parents or alert someone at Apple or even the police. If that doesn’t suit, trying to unlock the image will repeatedly see a suggestion of talking to parents or police, until the system finally relents after three tries, but only once they manage to enter a parent’s PIN.
In short, Apple’s Communication Safety provides a built-in system to prevent unwanted nudity and NSFW messages from appearing on a phone.
Beyond the nudity checking element, Apple’s family controls also provide parents with a way to edit the contact list of a child’s phone, to restrict some apps and service installs based on ratings, and limit adult content. Many websites are blocked initially and like unwanted nude images require a parent’s PIN to unlock, while others can be added to “always allow” and “never allow” lists, providing some room for parents to move.
And because the account is tied to a family member’s iPhone account, the child safety features also work on iPads signed in under the same account, and on Macs to some extent, as well.
There may be some ways for clever kids to get around these, but Communication Safety could be one of the more tightly integrated parenting systems around without being so heavy handed that it blocks everything, with additional improvements on the way for the next version of iOS.
Android elsewhere: Family Link restrictions
Over in the world of Android, things are a little different. Android is primarily a phone operating system with tablets making up some of what else you can find, but it doesn’t have a computer side of things to join the dots on desktop.
Compared to Apple, Google doesn’t have as much in the way of adult restriction controls, though some exist for Google’s family solution “Family Link”, an app that links child accounts to a family, and affords Android phones and tablets some control. Interestingly, Family Link doesn’t need an Android to work, and parents with an iPhone can use Family Link to connect to an Android given to their kids.
For the most part Family Link ties into app control, blocking and limiting apps installed on the phone, as well as website monitoring, essentially connecting both of these with what the parent wants for the child. It means app installs can be decided by the guardians, as can choice of the websites they visit, and much like Apple’s Communication Safety, parents will get an alert when someone tries to install something they shouldn’t.
What you won’t get is a message monitor, with Google’s child safety monitoring unable to look at the images sent to the phone. There’s no blocking of NSFW images in this phone, though you can prevent some apps (like WhatsApp and Snapchat) from ever being installed in the first place.
HMD’s approach: outright block of content using HarmBlock
Android may not currently have a heap of image-blocking solutions built in, but that won’t stop other companies from stepping in and filling the void. In the case of the HMD, select phones are now including a parental control service called “HarmBlock+”
Launched in Australia, the HMD Fuse is the company’s first to try this. What is essentially a re-released edition of the HMD Fusion before it, the Fuse includes HarmBlock baked into the hardware, able to prevent images and media that would be seen as NSFW thanks to a database trained with AI.
Together with HarmBlock+, the HMD Fuse can detect and delete images sent to the phone over messaging apps, and even prevent the camera from capturing similar images.
However, because the HarmBlock service is built into the phone in a deeper way, it may also affect other media that isn’t necessarily NSFW. In fact, it may totally block media that’s completely safe.
While HMD hasn’t yet provided a phone for Pickr to test (more on that shortly), demos of the platform with relatively soft images showed the system would outright block an image, suggesting other soft images may struggle. Some art may be blocked, pictures of swimsuits may, too, and we’re a little curious whether fairly innocuous scenes in movies might not work, either.
Disney’s The Little Mermaid may prove to be an interesting test: the main character of Ariel swims around most of the movie in what is basically a bikini. We’re not sure if this will flag HarmBlock’s system, but given the system doesn’t appear to have a level of granularity control, HMD’s nudity blocking phone may have trouble working out the difference and simply block otherwise harmless media.
It’s worth noting that HMD’s use of HarmBlock doesn’t necessarily mean parents need to block everything.
Much like Apple’s family controls and Google’s own integration, parents can control other aspects, such as the apps that are loaded onto the device, and even track the location of the phone.
As of the time this article was published, parents won’t get a notification about when kids and teens with a HarmBlock-equipped HMD phone view explicit media, but it will block the image from the phone when it happens, and even prevent the camera from firing if it’s viewing nudity.
For some parents, that might be totally fine. Blocking imagery, media, and content before it happens might be exactly what some parents are looking for.
In this situation, however, parents will need to remain paying for it, as HarmBlock is an extra service. In Australia, HarmBlock can be found on one device, the HMD Fuse, priced at $799 with the first year of the service baked in, and an ongoing subscription to the service costing $26.95 per user monthly, roughly costing a little over $300 per year per family member.
Editor’s Note: Unfortunately, following our write-up of the HMD Fuse’s announcement, the company has declined to allow this publication review the phone. While we’d love to take screenshots and inform readers how it works, that may not happen.
Pinwheel’s tight app control
HMD may provide blocks on nearly everything available on a phone for kids and teens, but there’s an even deeper approach that can outright remove the apps to begin with, and prevent a phone from having them in the first place.
Another phone made for parents, Pinwheel offers a tighter control of app installation, providing parents with a way to not only approve and remove every app, but also lock down other aspects of the phone. Track locations, monitor battery life, switch on specific schedules to limit contacts, and only allow certain apps, all of these things are possible with Pinwheel.
One thing the service won’t do is look at imagery or content sent to the phone, and is unable to obscure or blur NSFW imagery.
However, because kids can’t install those apps to begin with — nor can they receive messages from numbers their parents haven’t deemed as safe — they won’t likely be getting images like it in the first place, giving Pinwheel some definite safety.
Similar to HarmBlock, Pinwheel also charges a regular monthly amount, costing a little less at $25.99 per month or slightly lower outright at $279.99 per year (at the time this was published). Unlike HarmBlock, however, Pinwheel’s phones are designed to only be used with its service, making it a little less useful if you decide to stop paying.
An awkward conversation or two
There are many solutions, it seems, and we’re probably not covering them all. These are but a sample of what’s available in Australia for shielding your children from some of what’s out there, and you mightn’t even choose to use any of this.
You might simply choose to talk to your kids, and encourage them to communicate with you. That’s an option, as well.
Every parent is different and not everyone will agree. This writer’s parenting skills may not be like by everyone, and that’s fine. Each to their own; parents can parent how they see fit.
However, communication is a critical aspect of learning, of growing, and ultimately fostering trust. Some of the conversations about nudity and media made for more mature audiences will involve having slightly awkward and uncomfortable conversations, and arming your kids with an understanding of the internet may be one of those you just need to have.
If trust is what you’re after with your kids, having those awkward conversations and helping them to understand the web and its complexities could set them up for dealing with the potential problems in the years to come.
Regardless of what you choose, consider having that conversation, even if it accompanies one of these solutions. You might just find yourself building more trust with your kids, and they in turn may come to you more often, while you rest comfortably knowing their tech is taken care of, at least to a degree.
