Apple's 'Families' to help curb kids' screen addiction

To help parents control their children's screen addiction touted as a "growing public health crisis", Apple has introduced a new page called "Families" on its website.

The page has features like "Ask To Buy" tool that lets parents approve or decline app purchases from their device.

"Find My Friends" feature lets parents keep track of their kids' locations, get alerts when they leave or arrive somewhere, and see distances and travel times to where they are. Another app management feature lets users automatically block in-app purchases. It has the option to limit adult content on kids' devices and restricts browsing to only pre-approved websites.

"We've also made it easy for parents to set privacy controls on their kids' devices. We're continually designing new features to help make sure kids use them in the ways you want," Apple said on the new page.

Two key Apple shareholders had requested the Cupertino-based iPhone maker to take urgent steps to safeguard young users from the ill-effects of iPhone addiction. In a letter, Jana Partners and the California State Teachers' Retirement System told Apple to make its products safer for the younger users. Not only Apple, Facebook, which has over two billion users, is also making drastic changes to its News Feed that will allow users to see more updates from family and friends than posts from businesses, brands, and media.

According to its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook has got a feedback from the community that public content -- posts from businesses, brands and media -- is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.

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