
iPhone’s New Parental Controls Block Searches for Sex Ed, Allow Violence/Racism - okket
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8xj3bx/new-iphone-parental-controls-block-searches-for-sex-education
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BoorishBears
This is easily the stupidest thing I’ve read in a long time, and I’d like to
be reimbursed by Vice for the time it took to read it.

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smt88
I disagree. Do you have a reason, or do you assume there's no other way anyone
could feel about the article?

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BoorishBears
I assume the reasons should be clear to most readers on HN.

What do “Sex” and “Sex Education” have in common?

There’s the word “Sex” in them.

What did Vice do? Ignore the fact it’s clearly just filtering the word sex
blindly because no content filter is all knowing and never is is expected to
replace a supervising adult.

Then double down on it by randomly constructing sentences with the word sex.

“This just in, Apple pro Russia? Searches for ‘Putin corruption (sex)’ are
blocked by apples content search!”

Oh and it doesn’t block NSFW subreddits because Apple was expected to what?
Compile a list of nsfw subreddits? Intrusively scan pages for certain HTML
elements?

And it doesn’t block searches where individual words aren’t threatening?

Was Apple supposed to invent General AI capable of knowing “how to beat women”
is not a morally upstanding thing to search?

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smt88
OK, thanks for clarifying.

I don't think the simplistic algorithm makes it a non-story. To me, that _is_
the story. Why did Apple release something so under-baked that people had no
trouble finding problems with it in practice?

It's like if Apple released the "Mac Robot Nanny," and it was unable to tell
the difference between a baby and a pineapple.

People really care about automated "babysitting" features, so it's something
Apple shouldn't release so casually.

And I also think we can see how badly Apple is losing in the (very) nascent AI
product battle. Siri is far worse than Alexa and even Google Assistant, and
now this.

