Apple has spent years making sure its smartphones and tablets can be used safely by children, but some of the family-friendly content controls are too zealous – and seemingly biased. According to a report by The Independent today, the content controls are built into the screen time feature of iOS 14, which means that access to adult sites is restricted, and it also prevents users in Safari and other browsers from searching for the word “Asian”.
The block not only allows search for that one word – it also applies to related ideas and phrases. ‘Asian food’ is unlimited, as are terms such as ‘Asian fusion’, ‘Asian diaspora’, ‘Asian communities’, ‘Asian countries’ and ‘Asian politics’, ‘Asian cultures’ and ‘Asian hairstyles’. Oddly enough, the thematically appropriate term we tried to control Apple’s parental controls well allowed it was ‘Asian restaurants’, although related queries such as ‘Asian cuisine’ were rejected. Meanwhile, searches for similar terms with the words “European”, “African”, “Indian” or “Arab” in the place of “Asian” have just solved nicely.
At this point, it’s unclear exactly how Apple decides what conditions their parental controls should allow. For better or worse, however, the company has not done a very thorough job of enforcing these specific content restrictions. If you search for the word “Asian” in Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo or even Baidu – or one of the many related terms – your browser will tell you that you can not browse the page because “it is restricted.” This is true whether you are typing a search in the address bar of your mobile browser, or if you are navigating to the home page of a search engine and trying to search from there. Oddly enough, Yahoo is the only search engine that Apple offers as a standard option in Safari that handles these searches correctly.
(Full disclosure: Yahoo and Engadget have the same parent company, but that does not in any way affect the way we approached this story; it’s all just a weird coincidence.)
Perhaps the most important thing is that literally no of this is new news. The Independent‘s report mentions a recent tweet from iOS developer Steven Shen, who – before recently tweeting about the situation – noticed the screw and submitted a report on it to Apple at the end of 2019. Not long after that, in February 2020, the expected bias of Screen Time on Twitter was highlighted by Charlie Stigler, a product strategist at the enterprise services company Workday.
“The built-in adult iOS content filter blocks all searches with the keyword ‘Asian, if accepted as pornographic,'” Stigler wrote at the time. ‘Which means a 12-year-old Chinese-American girl could go and throw’ Asian hairstyles’ and find out that her culture is being blocked as’ adult content ‘. “
As we now know, the attempts to change Apple’s approach here did not work. We asked the company for comment and will update this story if it responds.