Parental Controls Part 2

With Apple's recent announcement at WWDC that they will be making it easier to find kid appropriate apps in the app store I thought it might be time to revisit the Parental Controls and go over the items I did not cover in part 1.

Again go to Settings > General > Restrictions. If you have already set up restrictions then you will have to enter your restrictions pass code. We will pick up where we left off in part 1.

Privacy Settings (red box)
There are a number of options here as you can see in the screen shot.


When you click on any of these items you will have two options (orange circle):

• Allow Changes
• Don't Allow Changes

If you have children primarily using the device you probably want to toggle all of these to "Don't Allow Changes." The reason is that many apps will ask on launch if they can access such things as Location, Contacts, Photos, etc. All the child has to do is click yes and its done. Location services is probably the biggest one here because there are many apps, particularly free apps that advertise that will ask for your location but do not need it for anything having to do with the app.


You will also see a list of all the apps that currently have access to that setting or account. In this case this is my Twitter and we can see that both the Twitter and Flipboard apps have access to my twitter account. I can toggle these permissions on or off.

It is a good idea, even if you do not have children, to go through this list and see what permissions you have given out to apps, you might be surprised what apps are trying to track you. If an app does not have a good reason for accessing this information then turn it off. For example I need Weathercube to know my location so it can give me the proper weather, but I do not need Fruit Ninja to know my location because it is just a game.

Allow Changes (yellow box)
This is the name of the next section for some odd reason, don't ask me why because that is the same thing we were doing before.
This allows you to restrict the changing of "Accounts" which means email, calendar, and contacts accounts. Setting this just means that if you have you device hooked up with your iCloud, or Gmail account your children won't be able to delete it, it also means that they will not be able to set up syncing with some other account.




The "Volume Limit" can be a little confusing. You cannot actually set the volume limit here, you can only choose wether or not that limit can be changed. To actually set the volume limit go to Setting > Music (green arrow).
This is important because especially with young children you do not want them putting the volume up too loud and damaging there ears. So you may want to set a volume limit and then select Don't Allow Changes here.

Game Center (blue box)
The last section just has to toggle switches. You can choose not to allow multiplayer games through game center and to not allow the adding of game center friends. This is just a way to keep your children from accidentally encountering an online predator through game center.

Well that is it for restrictions. There is one more parental control item that deserves its own post to explain so I will be getting to that later. Please make sure you take the simple steps you need to to protect your children on an iOS device. If you have not already read Part 1 you may want to do so.


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Thanks for reading, and remember, live better