Apple has spent years ensuring that its smartphones and tablets can be used safely by children, but some of its family-friendly content controls are overzealous – and seemingly prejudiced. According to a The Independent today, content controls integrated with the Screen Time feature of iOS 14, designed to limit access to adult sites, also prevent users from searching for the word “Asian” in Safari and other browsers.
The block doesn’t just allow searches for a word – it also applies to related ideas and phrases. “Asian food” is off limits, as are terms like “Asian fusion”, “Asian diaspora”, “Asian communities”, “Asian countries” and “Asian politics”, “Asian cultures” and “Asian hairstyles”. Strangely, the appropriate term used thematically indicates that Apple’s parental controls allowed it was “Asian restaurants”, although queries related to “Asian cuisine” were rejected. Meanwhile, searches for similar terms with the words “European”, “African”, “Indian” or “Arabic” in place of “Asian” have been resolved perfectly.
At this point, it is unclear exactly how Apple decides which terms its parental controls should prohibit access to. For better or for worse, however, the company has not done a very thorough job of enforcing these specific content restrictions. If you search for the word “Asian” – or one of the many related terms – on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo or even Baidu, your browser will tell you that you cannot browse the page because it is “restricted”. This is true if you type a search query in the address bar of your mobile browser or if you navigate to a search engine’s homepage and try to search from there. Oddly, Yahoo is the only search engine available 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 it has in no way affected the way we approach this story; all of this is just a really strange coincidence.)
Perhaps most worrying is the fact that literally none this is new news. The IndependentThe report cites a recent tweet from iOS developer Steven Shen, who – before tweeting about the situation recently – identified the problem and reported it to Apple in late 2019. Not long after, in February 2020, the expected trend of Screen Time was signaled on Twitter by Charlie Stigler , a product strategist at corporate services company Workday.
“The adult content filter integrated in iOS blocks all searches with the keyword“ Asian ”, assuming it is related to pornography,” Stigler wrote at the time. “Which means that a 12-year-old Chinese-American girl can search for” Asian hairstyles “on Google and discover that her culture is blocked as ‘adult content'”.
As we now know, these efforts to change Apple’s approach here have not worked. We have contacted the company for comment and will update this story if it responds.