Apple’s Family Sharing Helps Keep Children Safe. Until It Doesn’t

It’s easy Ask someone to delete it Apple account And start from scratch when it’s not your digital life on the line. But for anyone who has faced such a reset, it’s not just inconvenient — it’s traumatic. And this is just as true for children.

That’s because for Apple users, an Apple ID is more than a login — it’s a tether to friends, games, music and precious memories. for Google or Microsoft To users, it may be similar. It’s an ever-evolving, and increasingly important, digital identity scaffold. But in very specific circumstances, systems designed to support, delight and even protect families can become a trap. Parental control systems like Apple’s Family Sharing.

But let’s rewind a bit.

On paper, Family Sharing is one of Apple’s great triumphs. has been launched In 2014It was rolled out by Apple software chief Craig Federighi as a kind of digital fridge door—an “easy way to share what’s important,” like calendar dates, photos, reminders, and even apps and media, with minimal fuss. For parents, there were other benefits, such as being able to track device locations, controlling how much time kids had Looking at their screensAnd what they were doing when they were there. It was the most Apple of Apple: seamless and invisible when everything worked—a neat blend of convenience and control.

Courtesy of Apple

Apple-y family

But Family Sharing doesn’t come without its problems. Children under 13 years of age necessary Belong to a family group if they want an Apple account. But with screen time restrictions, they can’t go off on their own—and neither can older kids. The whole model implicitly assumes a traditional family structure, where one adult, the “organizer,” controls the purse strings—and everything else.

In this digital tech theory about the nuclear family—if culturally archaic. A person in charge (and a payment card) keeps things simple when things are rosy. Apple is not alone in this thinking. Parental control For example, Google’s Family Link and Microsoft Family Safety work under the same concept: a supportive head of household within a stable family dynamic. But not all families fit that mold, which is why these systems begin to break down when families do, or when they simply deviate from an “ideal” idea of ​​family. The lack of a dual-organizer role, effectively leaving the other parent as a subordinate administrator with more limited powers, can prove limiting and frustrating in blended and shared families. And in dark conditions, a single-organizer setup isn’t merely inconvenient—it can be dangerous.

Kate (name changed to protect her privacy and security) knows this herself. When her marriage fell apart, she says, her now-ex-husband, the designated organizer, essentially disarmed Family Sharing. He tracked their children’s locations, counted their screen minutes and claimed their accounts for them, and imposed strict limits on the time Kate took off from herself during her custody days. “Aggressive and coercive” is how she describes it. While Kate physically put the kids away, she also wanted to cut the digital cord – but it wasn’t that easy.

Long way out

After they split, Kate’s ex refused to break up the family. But without his consent, the children could not be transferred again. “I mistakenly assumed that being the custodial parent by court order meant I would be able to move Apple into a new family group with my children, with me as the organizer,” Kate said. But Apple couldn’t help. Support staff sympathized but said their hands were tied because the organizer had power. (Apple declined to comment for this article.)

The consequences of such cases are not abstract. When families break up, family sharing systems allow a non-custodial or abusive partner or parent to cling to digital control of their children. Their digital lives can be a coercive situation, even as their physical worlds are being forced forward. Kate recalls that her own children were constantly subjected to invasive questions about their movements, social interactions and activities based on data served by Apple Family Sharing. “It was scary and very frustrating to realize that we weren’t free yet,” she says.

This story unfolds with the standard advice given online in such situations: torch accounts and start over, losing purchases, memories and digital identities in the process. This is simple, when presented with alternatives, but rarely a satisfactory solution. Fortunately, Kate’s story has a happy ending. Her children exclude her ex by repeating a single refrain every time she interacts with them: Break up the family group. Eventually, he agreed, and Kate could set up a new family group with the original accounts. “Finally, we can all exhale,” she says. “But kids shouldn’t be parenting their own parents because tech companies have a serious lack of policies in areas like ours.”

unintended consequences

None of these systems are designed to harm anyone. These are benefits wrapped in polish, meant for happy families. But like AirTags—another product launched later with healthy intentions Revealed the potential for bolder use—The sharing system has its own dark side. Families can fall apart when they do. Although they are designed for stability, the reality is not always so neat.

Ken Munro, a partner at cyber security firm Penn Test Partners, says such surveillance is not uncommon: “Ring doorbell users faced a similar problem years ago, where it was impossible to remove the primary user. This meant former partners could connect and stalk a secondary user.” The solution, he says, is to buy a new doorbell. Still, Munro marvels that a company with Apple’s user-design pedigree “hasn’t considered the breakdown of the family unit, as it seems.” Or, he contends, perhaps Apple did but “adding up all the possible user flows and logic for the separated family would be a big task.”