Scottish school can’t deploy iPod Touches to students because of smutty App Store

John Brownlee ()

There’s small enough smut worth bothering about on the App Store, but if you’re the type who worries that exposure to, say, the hypnotic iBoobz app could your child into a sex-crazed Onanist for life, you probably have sympathy for the problem facing the Cedars School of Excellence in Greenock, Scotland.

The Cedars School wants to give iPod Touches to every one of their 100 students next fall. The only problem? Even though the iPhone OS has parental controls preventing kids from downloading apps rated 17+, you can still browse potentially illicit screenshots of these apps in iTunes.

In fact, the school is so alarmed by the fact that their students might be exposed to apps like Amateur Swimsuit , Movie of Sexy Japanese Girl and A Hidden Cam Thong that they are ready to disable Internet access to iTunes’ App Store schoolwide.

It all seems prudish, but silly or no, the school has an obligation to parents to filter their minor charges’ access for objectionable content, and it seems a strange oversight that Apple wouldn’t allow parental controls to be set across all sections of the iPhone app ecosystem.

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About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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  • nabil2199

    you should hide jesse jane’s vagina better.

  • John Brownlee

    How embarrassing. I didn’t even see that. Fixed, and thanks so much for the quick spot, nabil!

  • John Brownlee

    In all seriousness, I’m totally embarrassed, and I can’t apologize enough. I’ve replaced the image.

  • Wyseguy

    Wow. Someone needs to educate the IT staff at that school. They can use the iPhone Configuration Utility to generate a profile that disables access to the App Store on their iPod Touch units.

  • Tyler

    Honestly, Apple shouldn’t allow this kind of stuff on the app store anyway.

  • dave

    Tyler, aren’t you the uptight, censorship type who thinks they should limit what others can do/see/hear. Get a life and stop trying to control others.

  • bill

    Gotta agree. Itunes store has sleazy material. It’s a disgrace to Apple and decent folks. Just kank-it.

  • BoiseGuy

    Agree with bill, Tyler and wish Apple would give users the ability to not see the smutty apps. They can be there, but I just don’t want to see them and I don’t want them to show up in the top 25/50. Please Apple, give us the potential to block.

  • http://foresmac.tumblr.com foresmac

    “Wow. Someone needs to educate the IT staff at that school. They can use the iPhone Configuration Utility to generate a profile that disables access to the App Store on their iPod Touch units.”

    Actually, if you read the linked article, you would know that the problem isn’t that the admin doesn’t know how to kill access to the App Store. It’s that he’d like the kids to able to access age-appropriate content without being able to browse stuff that would get them in trouble. Apple’s current Parental Controls implementation offers no middle ground.

  • http://foresmac.tumblr.com foresmac

    “It all seems prudish, but silly or no…”

    Honestly, you’re saying that you know of a school—Scottish or otherwise—where you wouldn’t get in trouble for browsing boob apps or pictures of lingerie models? I’m not making any value judgements whatsoever, but I’d really like to know what school would let students, as young as 5, do this without at at least a reprimand.

  • Rory Parker

    Ridiculous, you can get sluttier images than the screenshots by typing pretty much any woman’s name into google images search, even with strict safesearch on…

  • Mattzook

    iTunes music store already has a ratings-based Blocking ability. It is user-enabled from iTunes. Why not have something like this for the iPhone OS, where a school administrator or whoever provides the local “wireless internet access” can automatically block viewing of certain adult-rated content?

    Let the local user, or the local school administrator, have the ability to block adult-rated content…. but don’t force Apple or the entire App Store to be censored.