Apple's Parental Controls are a Big Deal
Everyone is talking about Siri AI and Apple Intelligence, but Apple's new parental controls should take center stage. Regardless of what you personally think of Apple, they are the only big tech company to take a hard stance on user privacy: App tracking protection, iCloud Private Relay, and their refusal to unlock an iPhone for the FBI just to name a few examples.
This may be the age of AI, but it's also the age of verification. Age verification sounds good on paper, but in reality is a terrible, horrible, no good idea. And Apple clearly agrees.
At their 2026 WWDC, Apple announced an overhaul to screen time and parental controls which, to my eye, very intentionally put the onus of responsible parenting where it should always be: on the parents. Instead of requiring all users to verify their age (and identity!) via credit card, government ID, or biometric scan, Apple is providing the tools and resources to parents for them to properly monitor and manage their children's digital activity.
The technology landscape is constantly changing, and the only people who can keep up with it are nerds like us - and let's be real, if you're reading this, you're a nerd. The general public has no hope of "keeping up with the kids". So Apple's iron-fisted approach of allow-listing apps that their kids request provides parents with a kind of to-do list of apps to look into before approving. And the fact that the same method is built into web browsing is huge! It also provides a layer of phishing prevention, since it gives parents the opportunity to block potentially malicious pages. And all of this is accomplished without requiring government IDs or face scans.
"But what about kids who don't have a child account on their phone? What about parents who just approve everything without looking up the requested app first?" I hear you ask1. And to that, I say two things: be a better goddamned parent, and give us a higher minimum wage, stronger worker protections, and universal healthcare.
These are the "edge cases" that people dance around, but will never specifically mention, when arguing that online age verification is necessary. These cases are twofold.
The first case is the parents who won't even do a quick search to figure out if an app or website is appropriate for their child. These are the same parents who will carelessly give their child their ID or phone without a second thought - effectively bypassing age verification - or their credit card for in-app purchases on Roblox and trashy mobile games. The fix for these cases is not more state-sponsored surveillance, but rather state-sponsored resources and safety nets to help the parents, and when all else fails, CPS check-ins.
And overlapping with some of those cases are the second camp: the parents who simply don't have the time or bandwidth to be more involved because they're too busy juggling two or three jobs to keep a roof over their family's heads. In these cases, you can't simply blame the parent and tell them to do a better job. Likewise, having the government step in to parent the children for them - à la age verification - is a similarly terrible idea. Who is the government to decide what someone's child can or cannot see? What happens when (not if - when) laws are changed to include LGBTQ+ topics, sex ed, and uncomfortable realities about the world as "inappropriate for children"?
And if this whole movement were really to "protect the children from pedophiles", then why hasn't anyone in the Epstein files been arrested yet? And yes, it's incredibly hard for law enforcement to track down and prosecute predators. But do you know what makes it infinitely easier to prevent? Parents who are healthily aware of and involved in their children's lives, and who know who their children are talking to online. And that's a much easier goal to accomplish when parents aren't working 60+ hour weeks for barely above minimum wage.
Anyway, stepping off the socialist soapbox.
Governments and big tech companies around the world are chomping at the bit to expand age verification for their own increased control online and our decreased privacy. Apple's new parental controls are a proclamation that age verification isn't a necessary evil - that there is another path forward. I believe that people are born good, and that the majority of parents truly care about their children and want what's best for them. If the tools and education are created and pushed, and parents are given the time and space, then parents will learn and take advantage of them. This is the first step of what "protecting the children" actually looks like: providing comprehensive tools and resources for parents to make their own decisions instead of the government making decisions for them.
Caveat: Yes, children are individuals deserving of their own freedom. Yes, there are horrible parents out there who will use this to prevent their children from learning about the LGBTQ+ community, or escaping abusive religious or home life situations. But anecdotally, many of those parents already use some form of family-tracking app and commonly search through their children's devices manually. In these cases, Apple's new features neither help nor hurt.↩