iPhones are notoriously difficult to keep accountable and therefore to keep safe for young eyes and minds. Apple has doubled-down on user privacy at all cost, which means it is difficult for an iPhone to default to safety. It’s not surprising then that one of the questions I’ve been hearing a lot recently is how to protect, track, and mend mistakes made on an iPhone.
In today’s conversation we’ll talk about why iPhones are so difficult to keep accountable, how we can handle tough tech conversations about the content and choices our children might be making online, and what next-steps we can take to improve the safety and health of our children when they use their smart devices.
Show Notes:
Want some more support on how to make an iPhone safer using Apples suite of products?
1.Setup parental controls using Family Sharing: http://tinyurl.com/bdjxzmdv
2. Setup Parental Controls on the iPhone: http://tinyurl.com/4b6msrvw
This one has LOTS of great features including:
- Set Content & Privacy Restrictions
- Prevent iTunes & App Store purchases
- Allow built-in apps and features
- Prevent explicit content and content ratings
- Prevent web content
- Restrict Siri web search
- Restrict Game Center
- Allow changes to privacy settings
- Allow changes to other settings and features
- Make changes to health and safety features
3. Set up Screen Time for a family member: http://tinyurl.com/2dsrshrb
4. Recover deleted texts: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102615
If you’re keeping an iPhone, Bark software is a great decision, especially if your child accesses everything through a browser on an iPhone: https://www.bark.us/protects/home/ (use GospelTech10 at check-out for a discount!*)
You can always get a safer device. The Bark Phone is a great device for defaulting to safety as a starting point, or when an iPhone has proven too much for a young person. https://www.bark.us/bark-phone/
*NOTE: 100% of the proceeds from the Bark partnership go to our non-profit and fund this work of reaching more families with resources for raising healthy youth in a tech world.
Ways to listen:
🔗 click the link in the profile
🎧 search Gospel Tech in your favorite streaming service (iTunes, Amazon)
Transcription:
Hello everyone and welcome to The Gospel Tech podcast. My name is Nathan Sutherland, and this podcast is dedicated to helping families love God and use tech. Today, we are talking about a question that has come to me from multiple parents in the recent past. This has to do specifically with iPhones and accountability. So a little bit of context. I had a parent email me. I had a parent direct message me, I’ve had parents ask me multiple times at recent talks about how to set up accountability on an iPhone and how to address certain situations that they were dealing with with their children. And this is kids under the age of 18, people still living in their house under their purview and responsibility and discipleship, and they want to know how can I help the iPhone be a safer place?
So that’s going to be our conversation focus today. If you don’t have iPhones, I understand. Please hear for why that might be a beneficial decision. You can listen on that. And if you do have iPhones, this will help you kind of process this conversation on what can you do to help it be more safe? What can you do if it’s not currently safe? And what are your alternatives look like? And then thirdly, if you are a parent yet to bring smartphones into your home for young adults or for tweens or teens, my hope is this will help you process that in real time as you are looking at what should your next option be. So let’s start at the beginning, the iPhone as a device. This device defaults to data safety and privacy, not to user safety. And that’s an important point to know because it’s not true about all Mac products. It’s specifically the iPhone.
They default to data safety and privacy over anything else. This is what they’ve built their company on now. They default to user privacy at all costs to the point where someone committed a felony crime that took lives in the United States, and the US government went to Apple and said, “We need you to unlock this phone.” And Apple said, “No, user privacy comes first.” So that’s how intense they are. And it’s not just once. This has happened multiple times. So they have basically said, “User privacy is more important than anything else, and we are going to triple down on that.” So when people go, “Yeah, but my kid is using it. How can I have better user controls for my child?” they basically go, “Well, there’s no way to make a Trojan horse just for you to follow your kid around the internet and not have that be applied to adults too. And we’re not willing to open that loophole in our programming, so you can’t.”
And if you don’t know what that means, it means if you use accountability software like Covenant Eyes for pornography and filtering, if you use something like Bark to look at text messages and direct messages, those programs work great until they’re within an app because privacy only extends to within an individual device, or excuse me, where a device meets an individual app. Each app is its own little microcosm. So if your child is DMing people on Instagram or if they’re searching through Pinterest, you don’t see those messages. You don’t have any bark review or accountability or verification of what’s happening if they’re on an iPhone. But if they’re doing it from a personal computer, from a Mac laptop or off any Android device, Google phones, Samsung phones, you would see all of that information.
So just know that iPhones are built to be difficult when it comes to accountability. A couple perks of that. They do a great job… When you go and turn your phone in and you’re like, “Hey, I don’t want this phone anymore. I’m going to trade it in and get a new device,” Apple does a phenomenal job of allowing you to lock your phone with a password, and then that thing is encrypted and done. No one can pick it up in a warehouse and take it home and scrub your bank data from it. It’s very secure, and that’s awesome. I really do like that. But as I was describing to a friend earlier today, I was like, we need Mac and iPhone specifically is kind of like the Ultron of the smartphone world, and we need also the mother Teresa. We have the super smart of the tech world, and it’s very secure and powerful, and that’s great, but we need something with a soul. And the iPhone doesn’t currently have a soul.
They are not completely indifferent to this though while they’ve built their box and they say, “This is our box, we are a privacy company,” they are doing some safety thing. So this, if you work for Apple or you love your iPhone device, awesome. Here’s where they’re doing well. iOS 17 came out and said, “Hey, while we can’t create loopholes that would functionally create breaches for personal data or potentially create breaches, what we are willing to do is in iOS 17, we are willing to help create some content support.” So if you want to set… And this is a future resource that I will create and release, but the idea here is screen time and parental controls. Those two resources are solid. And under iOS 17, they allow a content filter. And it works on iMessage, it works on WhatsApp, FaceTime, and airdrop.
So the idea being if an inappropriate image is sent, it will automatically filter it and notify you that this is an inappropriate image. You can delete it without ever seeing it. This is most exciting to me in the airdrop world because kids with iPhones just in a public space like say a cafeteria, some kids think it’s really funny to take a picture they found on the internet or of someone else in the school, and it could even be just an artificial one that someone made with AI, and then airdrop it to every single Apple device in the area. And it’ll ask you, Hey, do you want to receive this airdrop, and you can decline it. But before iOS 17, it would just show you the image anyway and be like, “Hey, do you want to see this image?” Like, no, I didn’t, but thanks.
So now, it’ll use AI to detect that this is an inappropriate image, blur it, and then ask you, and you can delete it first. Again, you have to have parental settings set up, and it’s under content. There’s four different options, and this is one of the ones you can activate. That’s super cool. I really like the one with iMessage where if your child sends or receives an inappropriate image, it’ll do the exact same thing, say, “Hey, inappropriate image. Do you want to receive this?” But it can also send the parent a note. “Hey, just so you know, this image was sent or received. Do you want this to be sent or received?” And so I appreciate that. I like it when some of these devices start defaulting to safety. But the reason these questions are coming specifically about iPhones is iPhones are not inherently safe.
By design, they are inherently private. And absolute privacy when dealing with minors on the internet is not a situation that is inherently safe, so just know that going into this conversation. So then number one, when we talk about this, we need to understand that if your child is using an iPhone, if they’re using their own iPhone, and that is their smartphone of choice, that you need some kind of accountability, and that accountability needs to be teamed with parental controls and screen time. It’s not because you don’t trust your child. It’s because you love your child, and you don’t trust the world. They’re not the only actor in their internet experience, and you need some level of accountability to make sure that things are going okay because the Fifth Amendment is a thing. It is very hard to self-report mistakes, and it’s hard to self-report trauma that has been committed against you. So you want some accountability on there.
Bark and Covenant Eyes are both fine options, but they need to be paired with screen time and parental controls. And I actually have an iPhone. It’s basically locked down to be a dumb phone. I have maps. I have a training app. I have no social media on it. It’s pretty unexciting. I have one browser. I don’t have an app store, and the browser has Covenant Eyes installed on it. It now works with Safari, which is a cool thing in 2024. Covenant Eyes works on your Safari browser now, so it will see everything you access through the browser because, again, the browser isn’t an individual built app. So if I go to Instagram through my browser, all of that is accountable. If I go to YouTube through my browser, all of that is accountable. And again, I choose that as an adult because I like making good choices and I have goals for myself, but I also understand that I don’t want to have to keep making the right choice every 10 minutes.
I want to make it once today. Today, I’m making the choice I know best fits who I am in Christ, and then I get to do those things that fit who I am in Christ. I don’t want to every 10 minutes have to keep flexing my willpower muscles, because as Anna Lembke points out in Dopamine Nation, it is a muscle through willpower will fatigue. Yes, it can get stronger, but you really want to have to use it in specific situations. You don’t want to have to just constantly be hammering it out. It’s fatiguing mentally, emotionally, and at some point your willpower might just fail. So set yourself up for success, add some levels of accountability there. Second, then when these parents came to me, every one of them said two things. One, “I know my child made a mistake through any number of things. One is I’ve seen deleted message. Another is I’ve seen a deleted and reinstalled app that keeps coming and going.”
By the way, I’ve met children who say that they uninstall things like Snapchat when they walk out of the house if you have unfettered App Store. So they’ll uninstall the app. When they come home, they’ll reinstall it. And then you can delete an app without deleting the user data, so they don’t even have to re-log in when they go back to school. It’s just there for them. So they’ve seen that. Search history has been deleted. What was the other one? Text messages, search history, apps. There was a fourth one that I can’t remember off the top of my head, but this is generally what we’re dealing with. And the parents say, “How do I know what they were up to? How can I tell what they were doing,” which I can totally appreciate. That’s where our brains go. What were you doing? Who was involved? How many times has it happened? Right? How deep does this burrow go? And I would actually caution you as the second piece here…
The first piece is we need some kind of accountability and the iPhones are inherently not defaulting to safety. The second piece is it’s not so much about the what. It’s about the why, right? It’s not what were you doing? It’s why did you feel the need to hide this from me? That’s our conversation point. Certainly you want to know what. There’s different kinds of trauma that need different solutions, but you want to know why. This is God walking to the garden saying, “Adam, where are you?” And it’s not actually… God’s not surprised where he is. He knows what’s happening. The fact that your child has deleted something, the fact that your child is hiding something means something is wrong. The question now isn’t the, what were you doing? It’s the, why did you feel like you had to hide it from me? There’s only two options. One, “I was ashamed.” That’s option number one. “I knew it was wrong. I didn’t want you to find out, and I’m sorry.”
There’s also a third option, I guess. It could be, “Hey, my friend shared something with me that I didn’t feel was appropriate for public knowledge and I wanted to protect their information so I deleted it.” Okay. Maybe. There could be something in that vein. But generally, it’s going to be I did something wrong and I was ashamed of it, and I felt like it needed to be deleted and I purged that part. That’s one conversation. The other part is, “Because you have no business knowing, and I’m going to keep doing it anyway.” Now, that might sound really extreme, but I’ve actually had a parent, two parents in the last week, who came to me and told me, “This is what my child is saying. Child under the age of 18 has told me, ‘It’s none of your business and I’m going to keep making this mistake, so you should just let me do it. Get rid of the accountability. Get off my back. I’m going to make this mistake.'”
That’s a very different response as a parent than the first one. The first one is, “Hey, do we need better hedges? Do we need more accountability? Do we need some space away and we just take some time away? Again, Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation, saying it’s going to probably be 30 days for your brain to reset some of the rewards for us to actually figure out what are we dealing with? How do we make life fun again? How do we make healthful relationships? That’s one side. “I’m going to make purposeful mistakes and you can’t stop me.” Two things to say about that. The first is your child doesn’t actually know that’s true. If you’re dealing with a 15 or a 16-year-old who’s like, “When I turn 18, I’m going to make all these mistakes all the time anyway, so just let me do it,” they actually don’t know that.
That 15 or 16-year-old might get radically changed by Jesus in a saving process of the Holy Spirit of God moving in and making him or her a new creation, and by the time they’re 18, they might hate this behavior that they currently love and thrive on. So first of all, they don’t know that. That’s just true in this moment, and that can change as quickly as any middle school relationship can change from first period to sixth period. We’re in love forever. You’re dead to me. It can happen that fast. The second thing though is that if that’s true, that doesn’t mean you have to be party to it.
Parents, please hear me. If your child has said something as painful as that, just know that God knows that pain. He understands the hurt of being rejected by someone you love to the point of even an own family member. This is the prodigal son. The son comes to the dad and says, “Dad, you are dead to me. Give me my inheritance now.” Your child says, “Mom or dad, you’re dead to me. You have no say in my life. I don’t respect you enough to listen to your feedback, and I’m going to make these decisions, so just back off.” That isn’t your place to back off. In fact, you’re at a place to say, “Hey, I’m not going to be party to you making this mistake.” By the way, this is where the prodigal son story isn’t prescriptive. It’s not so let your child go make painful mistakes so that they can come back. That’s not the lesson you’re supposed to take.
The point is the son ran until the running proved fruitless and came back, and that’s what you’re going to stand on with your child and say, “Hey, I’m going to keep standing here. I’m not going to make it easy to make mistakes. I’m not going to make it easy to hurt yourself and others. And when you come home, because I’m praying Lord, that you will, I’m going to be the first one to celebrate it. I’m not going to judge you. I’m not going to remind you. I’m not going to say, ‘Ha, I got you. I knew you’d come crawling back one day.” I’m going to say, ‘My son, my daughter has come back. You were dead, and now you are alive. And I’m celebrating it you are my child, and I love you.'” Okay? That is your response to that rebellious teenager or preteen who is effectively flipping you, the bird, or in the case of both of these parents, literally flipping you the bird verbally and physically.
I know it’s so hard when it’s your kid, so please don’t hear me just poo pooing this or saying, “Oh, this is just what you have to do.” That’s brutal, and it’s so emotionally draining. It’s so difficult, but you need to hear that that response is different. The reason you ask the question is to hear the answer. Why did you hide it? The answer is either, “Because I was scared, because I made a mistake, because I knew what was wrong.” Very different response than, “Because you have no business dealing with my life. I’m like, well, all right. That’s actually not true. I don’t have to pay the bill on that thing. I don’t have to allow that in my home. I don’t have to encourage behavior that I know is going to hurt you and others. And in fact, I’m going to actively stand against it because I love you, not because I’m mad.
Not because I want this to hurt and somehow teach you a magical lesson in the future, but because right now, I can see this is unsafe. And you asked for an egg, and I gave you something that turns out it’s a scorpion. So we’re going to fix that by removing it and replacing it with something that’s going to be better for you. That brings us to the third point. Replacing that device is entirely reasonable. Please know, yes, parental controls are great. Yes, conversational relational building is important. That’s where hedges come in. It’s that second layer of, “Hey, I’m going to put some distance between you and this device.” It’s why I encourage no smartphone before 15. 15 is old enough that they will have developed a childhood at that point. Healthy relationships, how to have fun. They’ve seen some things go wrong with technology that they can point to and go, “Oh, I saw it get out of hand in this situation, and I know what’s expected of me and what fun looks like.”
They then have enough runway to build healthy habits. Again, 15, if they’ve asked for it and they’re proving faithful in the little things. As soon as they can’t hold family relationships together, follow up with family responsibilities, do their schoolwork, go to sleep, develop their faith journey… I’m not saying only give your kid a smartphone if they’re a Christian. I’m saying give your kid a smartphone when they’re taking life serious. Because if they’re not, they’re not going to take the phone serious either, and people are going to get hurt. So in that scenario then, you got to step three and you said, “Hey, iPhone’s a bad choice for us. What else can we do?” You can default to something super safety conscious, like a Gabb phone. Gabb phone’s the safest, no internet browser, no app store accountability built into it, and it’s very tool tech. It makes calls, sends texts, takes pictures, but can’t send or receive them. Love it.
Bark phone would be your first line. Like, “Hey, you’re going to sports and you need to call me. I want you to have a device in case you get stuck somewhere. I want you to be able to call me when things get out of hand and you don’t want to be around those friends anymore. I’m always there to pick you up and to make sure you’re safe.” Gabb phone is number one. Two would be like a bark phone. It defaults to safety, meaning it’s a dumb phone to start with. And instead of saying, here’s all of these apps and we’re going to block them by age level, well, that doesn’t always work because some apps are like a four plus or an eight plus, but they have unsafe and unhealthy content on them, so you can’t block them by category and you can’t block them by age range anymore. Well, it’s effectively useless now.
Bark instead lets you go app by app. And every single app, because it’s an Android platform, you can actually see what’s happening. So now your child could use an Instagram or a TikTok, but you will be privy to everything that’s searched on there, not in the terms of you’re going to read their digital journal because you trust them. That’s why you gave them the space. Sure, go into this digital space. You’ve proven yourself faithful. You can go there within our boundaries and family expectations, within our digital framework, but you’re not going to go out there without any accountability. And when something goes wrong, I’m going to lovingly intervene. So Bark looks at things like search. If they look up something on self-harm on depression, on drugs, you’ll get a notification. If someone sends a message, “Nobody likes you,” you’ll get a notification. If someone sends them a compliment, like, “You’re so cute, I can’t believe you’re only 12,” you’ll get a notification. And that’s your opportunity to step and say, “Hey, what’s going on?” There’s an emergency shutdown.
If you see something is actively going wrong. You’re at work, you’re on a trip, something is going wrong in real time and it’s going bad enough that you’re like, “Hey, I need to stop this now,” you can just full on press the red nuke button and turn the phone off. Everything shuts down until you can have that important conversation. You don’t want to let this keep spiraling and then ask questions later about what went wrong. So I do like the bark phone, especially when an added layer of trust is necessary. I think this is a great spot when that 15-year-old steps in and says, “Hey, I’m ready to start flexing my digital wings. I’m ready for some of these freedoms that I’ve earned.” I think a Bark phone is great, and that because it scales so well. And then if it needs to scale back, it’s very easy to do. Press of a button from your parental side. You do need a smartphone to be able to run this because there’s an app on that, but it’s a great way to help manage and keep helpful choices in front of you.
And then just know that sometimes the switch might just need to be as simple as we’re going to go from an iPhone device to an Android device. We’re going to get a Samsung or a Google device. That is not a step back. There’s no quality differential. Google has some very cool functions on their phone, including real time removing things from the background. So you’re like, oh, that weird person on the beach was walking behind us. You can just scrub them from the picture. There’s some really neat things they can do on those devices. The only downside is you will show up in green and group chat. So I message, everyone shows up in blue and all of your videos and pictures are super high quality. When you enter an Android device, everything shows up in green, and you’re the reason why. And I would simply say this, it’s super inconvenient, but I would say it is worth showing up in green if that fixes these unhealthful choices, temptations, byproducts of whatever was happening on the internet.
Your child is deleting something, is removing whatever content, trying to scrub their search history, and you want to make sure that they’re healthier with their internet choices, but you still want to give them some digital space to belong, then an Android device would make a lot of sense. It is worth cutting off your iMessage to save your soul, if you will, to paraphrase Matthew 5:28 through 30. So not that cutting it off is the saving point, but if that’s bringing sin and sin brings death, then it’s very loving to remove the hurtful and the harmful tech. So I hope this is encouraging to you. Again, I’m actively working on some resources to talk about how to set up screen time, how to set up parental controls, how to set up and even install something like common eyes on an iPhone and make that a safe space that can still be reasonable if being a blue part of the iMessage crowd is that important.
There are ways to do that. So those resources are coming, but I hope that this at least was a great introduction. Because as a loving parent, keep in mind, one, that iPhones do not default to safety. Two, it’s not about what they were looking at as so much as why. You know mistakes were made. That’s why they were hiding, but why did they feel the need to hide? Why didn’t they bring it to you? That’s important because that relational trust piece is your number one defense. There is no wall you can build that’s going to stop your child from making a mistake. It’s why God doesn’t use impermeable walls. He uses love and choice and it’s his graciousness. It’s his love and his grace that brings us to redemption, not the very true and real judgment that is also there. We want to extend that to our kids we love because we were first loved. And third and finally, it’s very reasonable to change the tech.
Swap it out, get a safer device, maybe a safer smartphone, maybe no smartphone or just a family device depending what your family decides, but the conversation is key in having that. So I hope this is helpful. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me, [email protected]. You can also find me @LoveGodUseTech on Instagram and Facebook. General questions, send them to questions at gospeltech.net, and join us next week as we continue this conversation about how we can love God and use tech.
