An end to 'sexting'

News has reached Big Brother Watch that the US Patent and Trademark Office has approved a patent submitted on behalf of Apple to end the practice of "sexting".

With the innocuous working title of the 'Text-based communication control for personal communication device', Apple's new application is set to "prevent users from sending or receiving “objectionable” text messages". The technology, which will be hosted on Apple's text message servers will effectively block any text messages containing sexual language or explitives from being delivered.

No mention has yet been made of whether the text messages which do not 'pass muster' will be stored by the company with a note as to their original sender.

Click here to read the full story at TechCrunch.

Hat-tip: GF

By Daniel Hamilton

Comments

[alastair]

"No mention has yet been made of whether the text messages which do not 'pass muster' will be stored by the company with a note as to their original sender."

I think scaremongering on the basis of a (probably speculative) patent is probably a little unnecessary, no?

[Andrew Ampers Taylor]

Alastair, You do make a good point, but in the case of the insidious creeping of governments and corporates, it is only by making a noise at the beginning that we can persuade these bodies to think again.

Once it is a "done deal" it is usually too late to do anything.

[Jens Ayton]

Having actually read the patent claims and part of the body, I find nothing at all related to sending anything to “Apple’s text messaging servers”. There are no references to servers in the claims, and only one in the body, which refers to a server from which incoming messages are fetched. That’s how SMS and e-mail work.

As far as I can see, this is intended for on-device filtering enabled through the phone’s parental controls preferences. (The phrase “parental control application” actually occurs several times.)

The patent is actually about language filtering that’s better than a simple dictionary blacklist approach, with (oddly enough) an eye towards forcing children to write a minimum portion of their texts in a specific language, which is presented as a foreign language learning aid.