How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?
Armed with some research (H/T @neil) and after spending some time reading up the subject, I went to the Apple Store and then spent an hour on the phone to Apple account support yesterday.
They're very aware that they dropped a bollock here and have thousands of very angry adult customers.
The support team manager I spoke to yesterday said that some sort of fix was due within days
That's the /good/ news.
(1/7)
The bad - and I have stressed this to Apple support (politely!):
There is currently no procedural fallback.
No one at Apple seems to have come up with any kind of plan pre-release for people who don't fit with Apple's implementation of Highly Effective Age Assurance (HEAA).
There were mixed messages on release day about whether passports would work. After many attempts, I've got my phone to take a scan of my passport and submit that; but it invariably fails to upload (see attached). (2/7)
So the verification procedure insists on government ID, but doesn't work with one of the two forms of government ID generally available in the UK.
Most UK citizens will currently have no access to a Government-backed 'digital identity service' (and won't until the Gov.UK Wallet comes out).
There are third party digital identity services such as the Post Office EasyID scheme that are backed by government documents, but Apple doesn't work with them. (3/7)
Apple are trying to pass the buck.
The internal corporate line at Apple, as repeated twice by different levels of support, is that they did this because the UK Government told them to.
This is arse-covering bullshit and I told them as much (politely).
What they will have been given is the seven Ofcom-approved methods of HEAA and told to comply with that.
Apple's implementation of three of those seven HEAA methods - and the lack of fallbacks - is solely the result of decisions at Apple. (4/7)
This is also a safeguarding issue.
As I found out yesterday, one of the things locked down in 26.4 is that Content and Privacy Restrictions is locked on. You need to pass age verification to change it. Until I can prove I'm over 18, all of these features like location sharing are enabled and I can't disable them. For me, it's an annoying inconvenience.
For someone vulnerable in an abusive domestic situation - this could be considerably more serious. (5/7)
There was no meaningful consent to this situation before upgrade.
I've gone through the release notes for 26.4.
I've gone through various media articles about new features in 26.4.
Nowhere is the implementation of age verification mentioned.
The Apple support staff mentioned that it had been discussed in forums covering the beta.
That's not something that will have been seen by 99% of iOS users.
(6/7)
As an IT pro, I use my phone for work.
Apple have damaged the utility of my phone for my job without even attempting to warn me beforehand.
Until this is fixed my choice is :
a) my phone is now a toy and not to be used for Serious Work
or
b) I risk my personal data by rolling back to 26.3
or
c) I fork out a grand and several weeks of effort to remove my data from Apple's ecosystem.
None of those are exactly great choices, are they?
(7/7)
@Nikkileah The senior support person I spoke to yesterday and this morning was talking about an expected fix within days.
So hopefully fixing this mess should be Apple UK’s top priority at present.
@gmh I suspect this is intentional pain. They want to motivate their users to oppose the age verification requirement itself.
I don't disagree with that goal, however I'm very happy to have de-Appled myself a decade ago.
@gmh this was the final straw for me, after they also prohibited encrypted iCloud storage (Advanced Data Protection).
I figured it would be worse than advertised because this isn't my first rodeo and I'm cynical AF these days so have turned automatic updates off for the first time ever in the hope I can stay on 26.3 long enough to sort an alternative out.
I've order a refurbished Pixel 8 and will be spending the weekend setting up GrapheneOS...
This timeline sucks!! 😔🤬
@CGM OK - how and where?
It’s entirely possible I missed something.
I’m going to Screen Time, and Content and Privacy Restrictions is currently enabled (per my previous screenshot).
If I try to disable it, it asks me to verify my age, and - when I can’t - keeps the restrictions enabled.
Have you had an Apple account longer than 18 years, perhaps?
@CGM I can see location sharing also in Privacy & Security - and I can turn that off on a per-app basis, and it seems to stick there, but at the same time Screen Time is reporting that location sharing is enabled. Not terribly useful!
When I was speaking to Apple support yesterday, they were trying to get me to turn off restrictions in Screen Time; and that was failing - so does the Privacy & Security setting get ignored because Screen Time overrules it?
I’ll experiment.
@gmh @CGM As far as I'm aware this being allowed just means "an app can request this permission and you can choose to grant it". I still think it's a cockup bodging these things into the parental controls system so you get these issues, but I don't think it inherently means that your location is being sent anywhere.
FWIW: it just worked for me, but that's because I had a credit card in my Apple Pay wallet. My father had issues trying to get it to verify until I added one to his (which was not intuitive in the slightest). And while I think Apples implementation is one of the less intrinsically evil age verification, iOS 26.4 has actively got me to try using a phone with much more OSS system software
@tay @CGM This really isn’t my speciality (*nix/network/security), so I’d be the first to say ‘I’m not sure’ here…
My concern is that the per-app location sharing and age-gated Screen Time restrictions both seem to cover the same area and it seems possible for them to say opposite things at the same time.
I don’t want to cause undue alarm, but equally, not being able to stop location sharing could have some really bad consequences, regardless of your age.
@tay @CGM Also, having read the relevant Ofcom guidelines this week; there are 7 ‘potentially HEAA’ methods; Apple seems to have done a partial implementation of three of them in a way that misses thousands of false negatives and locks down your device as a consequence, without warning you in advance. It’s shoddy stuff.
(I’m also not exactly enthused about people trying to shoehorn AV-enabling code into systemd…)
@tay @CGM Oh, totally. This is one of the things that has really fucked me off this week. I’m 50-something, I work in the nerd side of IT, and my phone is occasionally involved as a comms channel for forensic or generally specialised traffic.
(I’m not going to start portscanning stuff with it!)
If my phone manufacturer decides that no, You Won’t Do That With Your Phone, they’re affecting my day-to-day professional behaviour, without having asked or informed me first.
@atkelar Depends on who you’re sharing it with.
I think Apple’s thinking is ‘if they can’t prove they’re an adult, assume that the user is a kid given a phone by their parents’ - and in that case, it might be reasonable to default to sharing location, so you can find them.
This is part of the Screen Time interface; I think the intent is that a parent would set this up; in such a case, you wouldn’t want Junior turning the setting off…
@atkelar Aye, I think Apple are trying to do multiple things at the same time and making poor design decisions in the process.
(That said, I’m not a specialist dev, and I don’t know what the inside picture is. I know that delivering software involves compromises and that point releases will follow any major change…)
@linuxandyarn To be fair to Apple; it’s a reasonable default if you assume that the user is a child and that their parent or guardian will want to be able to locate them if needed. Applied to an adult, that has some potentially problematic consequences.
That said, the Privacy & Security settings also have enable/disable location settings on a per-app basis, and it’s possible for them to say different things at the same time, so I’m not 100% sure if it’s truly locked on.
@linuxandyarn That’s my fear; I need to do some experiments with apps to see if one overrides the other; it seems like a confusingly opaque bit of UI.
I’d love to be wrong here and it’s quite possible I am, but given the implications, it’s not a reassuring setting default.
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