Now, I really have heard everything! A report by NeoWin is detailing a new Apple patent which will prevent people from ‘sexting’, or sending sexually explicit text messages.
Apple, founded and based in “the land of the free”, a country where freedom of speech and freedom of expression are ingrained into the rights of every individual, has decided that their own customers clearly can’t be trusted to exercise good judgement when using a mobile phone.
Okay, so now I’ve got the frightening bit out of the way, this isn’t a technology that will be installed on every new Apple phone. It’s intended to be used by parents on their children’s phones and it will also help them to improve (I’d imagine by changing text automatically and not actually teaching them anything) their grammar and spelling.
There is an important message here though that Apple seem to be going down a road where they want more and more control over what people can and can’t do with the hardware that they’ve bought and paid for. This commentator can’t really see how preventing children from using sexual language will teach them responsibility.
If you want to teach responsibility to a child you have to allow them to use this language so that they can flounder with it, learn what it all actually means and eventually find out how it’s best utilised. Simply banning a child from doing something will, as well all know, simply have the opposite effect to the one you want by making it more desirable. Thus children will simply use the language elsewhere but in a way that can’t easily be monitored by parents and, as such, will make it far more difficult to teach children responsibility.
I would have thought Apple might have figured this out, but clearly not. This is, I have to say, a very silly idea and Apple would be much better off investing time and effort on the software the public really wants, which would prevent adults from sending text messages, email and social networking messages that we’ll only later regret when we’re drunk. Now that is an app we’d all pay for!
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So basically, Apple’s getting a patent for word filtering that everybody uses now. And they can now stop all other services from blocking sexually explicit text from minors.
Ahhh…. the social “good” of Apple never fails to impress.
Easily avoided. Apple aren’t the centre of the universe, and anyone who regards their gadgets as ‘must have’ deserves no sympathy.
I don’t see this move as Apple wanting more control over their hardware though I’ve seen many other movies like that by Lord Steve. Parental controls are nothing new; Parents have the V-Chip on TVs, Windows 7 has built in parental controls, in addition to numerous 3rd party apps. Why not give parents the option of stopping sexting if they can?
I view sexting as much worse then viewing pornography or playing Farmville at 2am on a school night. Who knows where those pictures will end up and how it will haunt them both in the immediate future and down the road.
who cares if it’s creepy or if it’s the right way to teach children responsibility — it’s absolutely not going to work! No chance.
Why? think:
What age group comes up with the most new ways to say things? That’s right; teens.
And what topic always gets the most new words and terms to describe it? Sex, of course.
Do you think Apple can possibly catalog every abbreviation and every misspelling of every slang term for every sexual act? If they somehow can, it will take exactly one week before kids have new terms for everything. Even if the technology can keep up, false positives will skyrocket and pretty soon the system will be totally worthless.
So, Apple became the Big Brother it used to hate with a passion (actually, that happened some years ago).