Gruber is uncharacteristically imprecise in the paragraph you quote.
If you look at the parental controls interface on your iPhone (Settings -> General -> Restrictions), it's obvious that Safari, Mail, YouTube, and so on can be individually restricted. There's also the more general option that allows restriction of third party apps based on rating.
The goal of the parental controls is to secure the device against anything that goes beyond a given rated standard. That explains these decisions that seem silly, like requiring an adult rating because if you search for 'fuck' you get a definition, or because an app provides a webkit view of a totally innocuous wikipedia page. These are security holes that an enterprising 12 year old who wanted to circumvent the parental controls might be able to exploit.
Yeah, you have to turn off Safari and YouTube and the rest to get a fully locked down phone, but you can do that. Doing so might be lousy parenting, but that's not at issue. The parental control feature is designed to allow a complete lockdown, that's what Apple claims it does, and the app review policy has to be strict, or it won't work.
The fact that you can lock down all third party browsers based on rating, but have to explicitly lock down Safari separately exposes the absurdity and inconsistency of this policy.
If Apple 'rated' Safari 17+ and youtube something like 14+, and the parental controls were applied universally, their policy wouldn't be nearly so bad.
Because what you call 'granularity' is intentional inconsistency.
Apple is making a fairly strict policy decision (open internet == 17+). But with separated parental controls for safari and youtube, they're are exempting themselves from the downsides of this policy (equivocating Safari with apps that actually do contain vulgar, suggestive and/or violent content).
If they were at least willing to eat their own dog food, one could argue that Apple doesn't feel their policy is too strict. That they don't demonstrates that even they can see that the classification system doesn't quite work.
I agree. It seems that apps that display unfiltered internet content should just inherit whatever setting the user has applied to safari. That way it's at least consistent.
If you look at the parental controls interface on your iPhone (Settings -> General -> Restrictions), it's obvious that Safari, Mail, YouTube, and so on can be individually restricted. There's also the more general option that allows restriction of third party apps based on rating.
The goal of the parental controls is to secure the device against anything that goes beyond a given rated standard. That explains these decisions that seem silly, like requiring an adult rating because if you search for 'fuck' you get a definition, or because an app provides a webkit view of a totally innocuous wikipedia page. These are security holes that an enterprising 12 year old who wanted to circumvent the parental controls might be able to exploit.
Yeah, you have to turn off Safari and YouTube and the rest to get a fully locked down phone, but you can do that. Doing so might be lousy parenting, but that's not at issue. The parental control feature is designed to allow a complete lockdown, that's what Apple claims it does, and the app review policy has to be strict, or it won't work.