Eager to keep your nubile teenage daughter from using the new iPhone she got for Christmas as a sexting terminal? Cupertino’s just patented technology to keep her blossoming libido as virginal as the App Store.
The new patent describes a way for parents to control their children’s’ text messages, allowing texts with obscene or forbidden language to either be blocked entirely or deleted from the content of the text and replaced with more age-appropriate euphemisms like “Hoo Ha!” and “Goof juice!”
The service would also allow the device to demand a certain amount of content be included in texts as well. For example, texts not including a certain number of foreign words might be deleted from the iPhone of a kid immersed in a foreign language study program.
Personally, though, I think I’d probably use this tech more to cut down on annoying text message spam. There’s really not a law against that yet?
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
