One of the biggest worries for parents in giving their young ones mobile devices is the lack of real parental controls. You can lock some phones down so that they can only contact certain numbers, but this is a far from ideal solution. Hence, Apple’s new patent for an anti-sexting system.
The official title of the patent states that it is a “text-based communication control for personal communication device.” That sounds pretty generic, but digging into the details of the patent, it’s easy to see what’s really going on here:
In one embodiment, the control application includes a parental control application. The parental control application evaluates whether or not the communication contains approved text based on, for example, objective ratings criteria or a user’s age or grade level, and, if unauthorized, prevents such text from being included in the text-based communication. If the control contains unauthorized text, the control application may alert the user, the administrator or other designated individuals of the presence of such text. The control application may require the user to replace the unauthorized text or may automatically delete the text or the entire communication.
In short, if Eric and Suzie start using colorful language in their text communications, their devices will may alert them to behave and possibly contact their parents. While this system might be useful for catching the most obvious cases, it probably won’t be able to tell what’s in that photo Eric just sent Suzie via MMS. However, it looks like the language of the patent is general enough to cover emails, IM’s, and any other text inputted into the device.
As TechCrunch points out, those interested in sexting can get pretty creative with their language to avoid detection. There is just really no way to accurately block these sentiments. A quick listen to popular music will give you an unlimited number of examples as to why.
On the flip side, it looks like this system could also be used to help people talk good:
In some embodiments, at least one of the message control conditions includes applying ratings to the message control conditions, at least one of which can correspond to the user’s designated language skill rating. The rated message control conditions can be applied to the entire message or a portion of the message according to the user’s designated language skill rating. In further embodiments, the designated language may include a required foreign language, vocabulary, spelling, grammar and/or punctuation based on the user’s designated skill level.
For those who believe texting and other short messaging services are destroying the way we communicate, this could be the solution.