2010
06.05
06.05
Stumbled into this on the iTunes App Store page for Opera Mini. What you need to note is the bright blue text that says “You must be at least 17 years old to download this game” which is followed by the reason “Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes”.
To start of, the first thing thats wrong should probably be the fact that the Web Browser is not a game. I’m not going to get into how they found Mature/Suggestive Themes on the internet (god knows there are a lot of those) but shouldn’t Safari have these same warnings?
Update: This is just an observation I made. I am not going anti-apple here and am not an Apple Critic. This post was supposed to fall under the humorous mixup category.
The reason there are warnings is because Safari supports parental controls (i.e. you as a parent can disable Safari); they’re letting you know that if you want to restrict what the user (e.g. your kid) does with it, you should reconsider installing this app as well.
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I think the main reason that Opera is handled different from Safari is that Safari has distinct parental controls in the iPhone Settings>General>Restrictions, whereas the only similar mechanism for Apps is the age classification in the App Store.
(P.S. Found this post via https://twitter.com/newsycombinator/status/15511053333)
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Same crazy situation with the Wired app for the ipad: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wired-magazine/id373903654?mt=8#
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Safari can be blocked just like other “17+” apps, and the warnings don’t do squat unless you have a phone with parental controls on it. I’m sure that makes it a pain for a 16 year-old kid with an iPod to download a Wikipedia app if their parents enabled parental controls, but that’s exactly what parental controls are about: being a pain-in-the-ass and ineffectual. Apple’s App Store rules are silly, but they wouldn’t be the monster here — that’d be the chump parent who locked down their kids’ iPhone.
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Apple has been providing these kind of warnings on any application that accesses the broader net — RSS readers, dedicated bulletin board readers, Twitter clients — for at least over a year now (when you download such apps, it displays a warning and asks you to confirm, etc.) It’s for liability issues, and to inform customers.
The parental restrictions built into the OS allow parents to disable Safari entirely for the exact same reasons. You’re kind of nitpicking here, no? (To say nothing of your sensationalistic headline.)
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admin Reply:
June 5th, 2010 at 10:43 pm
Not being nitpicky, just found it humorous when I saw it. As for the sensational headline, I wanted people to read this and thats about it.
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This is a longstanding Apple iPhone App Store process:
Any app that allows viewing or downloading of Internet content gets a Mature 17+ rating.
AFAIK it starting with ebook readers that allow downloading ebooks from the Project Gutenberg ebook collection, which contains the Kama Sutra.
kb
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