Comment by pdpi
5 hours ago
Clearly, nobody at Apple is thinking globally about this stuff.
If you have kids, "Screen Time" is a reasonable enough name for the place where parental controls live.
If you work under the assumption that AI features are OK in general, but potentially problematic around kids in particular, parental controls are a reasonable enough place to put these AI controls.
If you're not a parent, and have broader concerns about AI, you'd never even think of looking for these options where they are.
It's very weird that these aren't in the already existing top level "Siri" or "Privacy & Security" settings tabs. Apple has had a problem for a while now where it seems like they just don't know what they want to do with the settings app, and like you said, doesn't have anyone in charge of the "global" view of the settings. Why are, "Appearance", "Desktop & Dock" and "Wallpaper" all different top level items? Why are "Wi-Fi" and "Network" different top level items? Why is "Battery" top level, but "Time Machine" and "Sharing" and "Date & Time" are all under "General"? Why is "Autofill & Passwords" under general and not "Privacy & Security"?
If AI/LLMs are so great, why isn't Apple using them to better organize all these settings?
They don't want you to associate it with it being a privacy and security shortcoming.
Sure, that's the obvious first pass snarky answer, but clearly they don't actually want to not have associations between AI functions and privacy because they make those associations in all sorts of place. Go into the Siri controls and you find links like: "Voice input is processed on Mac. About Siri, Dictation & Privacy..." or "About Apple Intelligence & Privacy...". Go into the Privacy settings and that's where you find the "Apple Intelligence Report".
And of course the referenced settings despite being under the Screen Time top level settings are still within a sub-section there called specifically "Content & Privacy". So the quick answer is obviously not the correct answer.
As someone who has spent a lot of time trying to configure my iOS/Mac experience to be more intentional/less addictive, I am intimately familiar with Screen Time at this point. And my gut says this isn't an oversight on Apple's part at all.
This is very intentional because in my experience, Apple's attempt at actually managing screen time and device access is mostly theater, and it absolutely tracks that they'd bury this config within Screen Time.
What have you found to be effective for you? I recently heard of this (basically Brick but open source and with any NFC tag or barcode), but I haven’t gotten a chance to test it out yet: https://www.foqos.app/