Child Account mandatory for under-13 users: Setting up a child account on Apple devices — including iPhone, iPad and Mac — will soon be mandatory for children under 13.
How age-gating works under Child Account: Once a Child Account is set up, parents can choose exactly which apps their child can access on their device.
Apple’s new child account feature appears to be a safety net, meant to keep the company out of regulatory trouble.
Apple’s child account feature does not address the self-declaration problem either.
Privacy and surveillance concerns: MediaNama’s founder argues that age verification systems cannot function without verifying everyone who uses a service.
As India debates the side effects of digital addiction on minors, Apple has unveiled a new safety feature called ‘Child Account’ that will allow parents decide to what content their children can see, which apps and websites they have access to, and who they can communicate with. The move comes at a time when Big Tech is facing mounting scrutiny over minors’ use of social media, and several countries worldwide have either completely banned social media for children or are weighing age-based curbs.
1. Child Account mandatory for under-13 users: Setting up a child account on Apple devices — including iPhone, iPad and Mac — will soon be mandatory for children under 13. Parents will be asked to create a child account while setting up a new device for their child. While the feature will be available to all users under 18, those above 13 can choose to bypass it.
The feature is not live yet. Apple only previewed it at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on Monday, June 8. Users will be able to access Child Account after downloading the Screen Time update for iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, which will launch later this year.
2. How age-gating works under Child Account: Once a Child Account is set up, parents can choose exactly which apps their child can access on their device. They can either choose from Apple’s curated set of apps or decide for themselves whether the app is appropriate for their child. The list can be modified over time. Additional parental controls under a child account include:
Ask to Buy, which enables parents to require that their child get their approval before downloading an app from the App Store — whether free or paid — or making in-app purchases.
Ask to Browse, which enables parents to require their child to get their approval before accessing a new website in Safari.
Ask to Approve will help parents control who their children can communicate with via Messages, FaceTime and Phone. When any new contacts text, call or FaceTime a designated child account, parents can ask their children to get their approval before connecting with them.
3. Apple introduces new content filters for minors: Gore or violent content will be blocked when detected in shared images or videos sent to Child Accounts. This is on top of existing filters that automatically blur nudity in Messages and during FaceTime calls, a child-safety feature that is turned on by default for users under 18.
4. Why this matters: Over the last year or so, countries including Australia, Denmark, Spain and Greece have either banned social media for children or proposed similar legislation. Sweden is also said to be weighing a minimum age of 15 for social media. India, which is one of the biggest markets for Big Tech firms like Apple, Google and Meta, is also mulling tiered age-based restrictions for minors’ social media use. The move comes amid concerns that social media is increasingly being used for cyberbullying, data privacy violations, sexual abuse of children and cyber fraud. Apple’s new child account feature appears to be a safety net, meant to keep the company out of regulatory trouble.
Interestingly, Apple’s requirement for all under-13 users to have a child account contradicts its own stance against online age verification. Last month, its CEO Tim Cook reportedly challenged a Texas law that requires app store owners such as Apple and Google to verify users’ ages before they can download apps. Chamber of Progress, a tech lobbying group backed by Apple and Google, has backed proposals like the Parents Over Platforms Act, which would not require strict age verification of users and would put an additional burden on developers such as Meta.
5. How India is trying to regulate the internet for children and why gaps remain: India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) law mandates “verifiable parental consent” for processing children’s data — for users under 18. Companies collecting that data are prohibited from tracking or monitoring a child’s behaviour or serving targeted ads to children. However, there are widespread concerns that children can circumvent this requirement by misrepresenting their age.
“What MeitY has now done with the (DPDP) Rules is to incorporate a (probably illegal) bypass, by allowing children to self-declare their age. Self-declaration makes the law redundant because Children will lie about their age. If a child does not disclose that they are a child, then parental consent is never triggered,” writes Nikhil Pahwa, founder and editor of MediaNama, in his Reasoned newsletter.
Apple’s child account feature does not address the self-declaration problem either.
During a recent MediaNama roundtable discussion, participants also debated whether app-store-level age verification would work in India’s shared-device reality, arguing that children already access services through parents’ phones and accounts. One speaker said “every child basically knows how to use their parents’ phones and has unlimited access”, adding that children frequently use unlocked family devices where “parents are not checking for what OTPs are arriving”. The speaker argued that any app store- or platform-level age check would end up authenticating the parent rather than the child because “it’s the parent’s ID that’s going into their age-based check”.
What happens when Apple is notified or receives a complaint that the individual who has created the child account is not the parent? The child may provide identity/age details belonging to an adult who is not their parent. The parent may not have access to digital verification systems (no DigiLocker, no smartphone, no government-linked digital ID). What if a 20-year-old sells parental consent to children not willing to obtain consent from their parents? Notably, people have been caught selling read-write access to the Aadhaar database for Rs 500.
6. The problem with facial age estimation: One of the speakers highlighted how facial age estimation tools also fall short of making reliable estimates. “Someone put up a Barbie doll instead of their own face, and the AI guessed their age as 102,” they said, describing a widely circulated incident involving a facial recognition age-check tool.
Another speaker said they would not be comfortable with any company or government running facial recognition on a child. “I use DigiYatra quite frequently myself. But I’m trading convenience for this. We need to look at building resilience in the child against the harms, because the harms are not going away,” they said.
7. Privacy and surveillance concerns: MediaNama’s founder argues that age verification systems cannot function without verifying everyone who uses a service.
“To verify who’s a child, they’ll have to verify everyone who’s using a service,” he said. “Once that verification mechanism comes in, it will be used for everything.”
He added that social media would likely only be the beginning. “I’m sure gaming and AI will be the first to be included after social media is,” Pahwa said during MediaNama’s May 15 roundtable discussion in Bengaluru on ‘Age verification and restricting social media for children’.
“I see that as the first step in a longer direction of bringing age verification to everyone’s usage of the internet and age verification for almost everything on the internet.”
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