How to Prevent Kids From Bypassing IOS 13.3’s Communication Restrictions
When we were in awe of Apple’s new communication restrictions that allow you to restrict who your child can talk to (and when), we didn’t realize that Apple left a big loophole that allows your cunning child to easily work around those restrictions.
Communication restrictions allow parents to restrict who their children can talk to at any time (all or only people in their child’s contact list) and when the child runs out of allotted screen time during the day (all or only certain people in their child’s contact list) …
But, as CNBC found out, getting around these restrictions is pretty simple. For example, if your child sends an SMS from an unknown number – for example, his school friend, who distracts him from homework – the child can simply use the link provided to add that number to their contacts. And once they do, they can chat with this person as much as they want. (The parental PIN should prevent this, but appears to be buggy.)
Better yet, if your ballerina child also has an Apple Watch, they can simply ask Siri – on the watch – to call or write a text message. Whether they are flawed or intentional, any communication restrictions you set don’t seem to constrain this clever workaround.
Outsmart your child with these workarounds.
Good news: Apple is working on fixing some of your kids’ gimmicks. If you don’t want to wait, you can also use a few of your own measures to thwart creative workarounds.
First, try enabling idle time on your child’s device under Settings> Screen Time . I’m not sure if you need to play around with any additional settings (via the Always Allowed section) like fetching messages and FaceTime from the list of allowed apps, but CNBC notes that simply enabling idle time should be enough to remove this link. this allows your child to add unknown numbers to their contacts – at least during downtime. The link will likely persist when your child has Screen Time available.
To fix this problem, you can also force your child’s iPhone to sync their contacts to iCloud rather than another service like Google, which should prevent a smart workaround. To do this, go to Settings> Contacts , click on Default Account , and make sure it’s set to iCloud.