The application doesn’t actually use the word “sexting” anywhere. It also pitches this as an app to serve a parental demand.
The summary of the "
Text-based communication control for personal communication device" filing reads:
“One problem with text-based communications is that there is no way to monitor and control text communications to make them user appropriate. For example, users such as children may send or receive messages (intentionally or not) with parentally objectionable language.
“A parent could prevent a child user from accessing specific websites, or limit the user to communicating electronically with a limited set of individuals or e-mail addresses. Such solutions, however, still do not address the content of the communications that the child user has with the permitted communicators.”
Hence the need for powerful set software and hardware modify the communications themselves.
Apple’s patent also seeks to defeat people who would avoid the device dictionary (which seeks to auto-correct any salty curse words) by deliberately misspelling or using “non-standard forms of words” to express naughty ideas.
Apple’s text filters would also seem to identify and make allowances for the “user's age or the user's educational skill level.” There’s even a notion in the application that the suggestions in the filter may actually improve grammar of thwarted sexters.
Strangely, in this section of Apple’s patent application it wrongly defines the text-slang “LOL,” positing that it means “lots of luck.” As any teenager can tell you, it means “laugh out loud.” How smart could the pattern recognition software be if the people writing the patents don’t know the most basic of text code words?
And just how Orwellian are the “parental” controls? Well, attempting to send lewd notes loaded with banned language could send out an alert to an administrator/parent, prompting immediate action:
“If the control contains unauthorized text, the control application may alert the user, the administrator or other designated individuals of the presence of such text. The control application may require the user to replace the unauthorized text or may automatically delete the text or the entire communication.”
This “invention” would even allow a user to intercept any “inappropriate” incoming or outgoing messages, and reroute or alter them at will.
As appealing as all this might be to any potential parental super-controller, it seems much more likely that corporate IT departments would to set up such trapping filters for employees in sensitive positions with access to company-owned mobile devices. How aggressively they pursue and exploit the technology may raise more concerns than we currently hear about the epidemic of teenage sexting.
One final note, nothing in this application looks like it would stop teens, or star athletes, from sending x-rated photos by text or e-mail.
