Parental Controls

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How to Use the New Parental Controls in iOS 12

Photo: Apple

Parents, to curb your kid’s phone usage, you may no longer need to hold their chargers hostage, yell out nightly countdowns (“Three more minutes!”) or draft up elaborate tech contracts that you’ll look at exactly once. At least, if you’re on Apple devices. The new iOS 12 parental controls are here, and they allow you to manage your children’s screen time—set app time limits, block off chunks of “downtime” and track their daily habits—all from your own phone. Here’s what you can do, and how to do it.

How to access the Screen Time feature for your child using your own device:

Make sure both of your devices are on iOS 12.
Set up Family Sharing if you haven’t already.
Go to Settings > Screen Time.
Scroll down to the names of those in your Family Sharing plan. Choose the child for which you’d like to set up parental controls.
Enter a four-digit Screen Time passcode. Choose one that you can remember and your kid can’t guess. You’ll need it to approve requests for more screen time.

Now, here’s a look at what you can do with Screen Time.

Lock Your Kid Out of Their Phone During Family Dinner or Bedtime

The feature: Downtime

How it works: Remotely schedule a block of time in which your kid’s device cannot be used, such as during family dinner or his little sister’s flute recital. During this stretch, an icon will appear on all his apps indicating that they are not allowed to be used. (Phone, Messages, FaceTime, Alarm and some other functions will still work by default, but you can shut those down, too, if you wish.) If there are apps that you do want your kid to have access to during the scheduled downtime—say, bedtime meditations or white noise—you can make them Aways Allowed.

Tip: It might help to talk about your limits with other parents in your neighborhood. If you all plan to block your kids out of their apps at the same time, perhaps they can—gasp—call each other on the phone or even hang out IRL.

Put Time Limits on Fortnite (or Any App)

The feature: App Limits

How it works: Set a specific amount of time that your kid can be on certain apps each day. You can create limits for either specific categories, such as Social Networking or Gaming, or all apps. (It’s a little frustrating, however, as you don’t get to determine which apps go in which categories.) A warning will appear five minutes before the time is up, preventing screams of shock and despair. Once the allotted limit has been reached, your child can send you a request for more time, and you can either approve it or not.

See How Your Kid Is Really Spending Her Time On Her Phone

The feature: Activity Reports

How it works: On your own device, you can check out daily and weekly activity reports showing you how much time your kid is spending in each app (or across categories of apps), along with the number of notifications he’s receiving and how often he’s picking up his phone. It’s a way to know if he’s sneaking in games during third-period math or playing Roblox when he’s supposed to be in his room reading.

The reports can also be a good place to start a conversation with your kids about screen time, especially if you’re tracking your own phone usage. (I am, and it’s slightly horrifying.) You can ask your children how much time they think they’re spending on their phones, and then compare that to the actual data. As Tommy Sobel, the founder and CEO of Brick, writes: “Most people use their phones twice as much as they think they do, so seeing your actual minutes spent can be an incredibly powerful impetus to get real with yourself and get motivated about the need to take control of your phone habits.”

Block Content and Turn Off In-App Purchases and Location Services

The feature: Content & Privacy Restrictions

How it works: We’ve long been able to limit kids’ access to music, movies and other content on Apple devices, but with iOS 12, we can now do all of this remotely. Under iTunes and App Store Purchases, you can choose whether your child may install new apps, delete apps or make in-app purchases. Under Content Restrictions, you can set content ratings for books, music, TV shows, movies and apps. (I like how specific you can get—for instance, you may want to block “explicit” TV shows while giving your kid unfiltered access to books.) If you don’t want any app to know your kid’s location, you can indicate that, too.

As your kids get older and show that they can use their phones responsibly, you’ll want adjust their Screen Time settings in a way that makes sense. Let it be an ongoing conversation. If you need some talking points, check out our age-by-age guide to setting smartphone limits for your kids.

Source:
LifeHacker

September 21, 2018 0 comment

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How to Stop Fortnite Purchases on iPhone and iPad

written by applenws

Fortnite is the latest gaming craze that seemingly every kid, teenager, and some adults, are obsessed with. The cooperative shooter game may be tons of fun for the players, but what can be less fun is the discovery of a big expensive bill from Fortnite by way of in-app purchases.

This article will show you how to stop Fortnite purchases and prevent any unauthorized buying or purchasing of anything from the in-app and in-game temptations.

How to Turn Off Fortnite Purchases on iPhone and iPad

Want to disable buying stuff and purchases in Fortnite on an iPhone or iPad? Whether it’s your own, a kids, or someone else’s iOS device, here is how you can disable the in-app purchase mechanism:

Open the “Settings” app on the iPhone or iPad you want to disable Fortnite purchases for
Go to “General” and then to “Restrictions”
Tap on “Enable Restrictions” (if you have not done so already*) and then enter and confirm a restrictions passcode – note this will be different from the general lock screen passcode in iOS
Locate the switch for “In-App Purchases” and toggle that to the OFF position

How to disable purchases in Fortnite for iPhone and iPad

Exit out of Settings as usual

With in-app purchases disabled, no app can make purchases from within the application. This will prevent any and all accidental (or intentional) purchasing from Fortnite as well as from other apps on the device.

* If you set the Restrictions passcode some time ago and forgot it, you can reset a forgotten restrictions password in iOS by resetting the entire device and restoring from a backup. A bit of a hassle, so don’t forget the restrictions passcode!

The Restrictions feature is sort of like parental controls for iOS, and turning off in-app purchases is one of a variety of features available to restrict individual device usage and activity on the iPhone or iPad.

This particular setup is going to disable all in-app purchases on the iOS device, but perhaps down the road a future version of iOS will allow for disabling or enabling specific apps to have the purchasing ability, while also retaining some control over spending limits.

There are other options to control purchases as well from Fortnite as well as other apps. For example, you can setup and use Family Sharing and “Ask to Buy” which requests a request to be sent to you (or the parent) before making a purchase. You can also set up an App Store / iTunes allowance which will set that as the limit of purchasing activity, though it should be noted that it can be easy to spend money fairly quickly with in-app purchases in many games, Fortnite included.

There are other ways to play Fortnite, and this article is obviously geared towards preventing purchases in Fortnite from an iPhone or iPad. But if you’re on another device, or the person is playing Fortnite on an Xbox One, a Playstation 4, or a computer, then you can follow separate instructions for disabling unauthorized purchases on those devices too at this Lifehacker guide. Thanks to Lifehacker for the handy tip idea!

Do you know of another way to stop purchases in Fortnite? Let us know in the comments below!

Source: OSX Daily

April 28, 2018 0 comment

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How to Disable Bad Language in Siri on iPhone and iPad

written by applenws

If you don’t want Siri to ever dictate, speak, or write out explicit language, you can disable bad language in Siri for iPhone and iPad completely.

By disabling explicit language support in Siri, the virtual assistant will use asterisks to cover up curse words and bad language, like “s**t”, and will literally bleep explicit language if it is spoken or repeated by the AI voice for whatever reason.

To be perfectly clear, it’s not like Siri is going to swear at you if you don’t disable explicit language specifically. Siri will go out of it’s way to avoid bad language, and often reply to a curse word with something like “there’s no need to say that!”, but sometimes Siri can hear or interpret something wrong, a bad word can be fond when Siri is reading something on screen to you, or if you routinely use colorful language and four letter words yourself then it will be dictated and incorporated into the Siri commands you give to your iPhone or iPad. Also, some music and media content contains explicit language in the titles, and some foreign language translations may be dirty, and so those are additional situations where bad language could arrive from the typically polite Siri.

How to Disable Explicit Language in Siri for iOS

Open the “Settings” app and go to “General” and then to “Restrictions” (you may need to enable restrictions to access this settings section, just don’t forget the passcode)
Tap on “Siri” under the Restrictions settings
Look for “Explicit Language” and turn the setting OFF to disable explicit language with Siri

Disable Explicit Language in Siri for iOS

Exit out of Settings

Now if you use Siri and feed it bad language (or vice versa if you can somehow get Siri to curse at you through a series of goofy Siri commands or legitimate ones), then Siri will use asterisks to blank out the bad word(s). Additionally, Siri will literally bleep bad language instead of saying it, sort of like what you hear if someone curses with bad language on live radio or TV, except it’s Siri doing the beep bleeping.

Siri bad language disabled

If you’re wondering why this setting is in Restrictions, it’s probably because the Restrictions feature of iOS is sort of like parental controls on the iPhone and iPad, and you can use other Restrictions settings in iOS to block adult content and adult websites too.

Siri disabled bad language

Remember, if you do set a restrictions passcode then do not forget it. If you forgot your iOS Restrictions password you will need to reset it which is not a particularly fun process that involves backing up and erasing the device, but as of now that’s the only thing to do.

And of course if you want Siri to have free reign with his/her language and be able to say **** at will, then re-enable the Explicit Language toggle again via Settings > General > Restrictions > Siri > Explicit Language.

This could be a particularly helpful tip for parents and educators, even if Siri will typically never report bad language unless it is dictated as a command. Or maybe you can use it yourself if you’re trying to cut out some particular words from your vocabulary? Who ****ing knows!