A mother with court-ordered custody of her children has described how Apple’s Family Sharing feature can be weaponized by a former partner.
Apple support staff were unable to assist her when she reported her former partner using the service in controlling and coercive ways …
Family Sharing
The family sharing feature was introduced as part of iOS 8 way back in 2014.
Your family of five (six including yourself) each have their own Apple ID with the same credit card and can download apps and iTunes. Your family does have to have their Apple ID based in the same country. Also, parents can approve their kids’ purchases right from their device.
Besides managing the App Store and iTunes purchases, Family Sharing can help you track where your children are using Find My Friends and can help find their lost devices using Find my iPhone.
Family Sharing also allows you to easily create a shared family calendar and shared family reminder list that anyone in the family can view and edit. It also creates a shared family photo album.
A flaw allows the feature to be weaponized
There is, however, a detail which may seem insignificant to a conventional family when all is well, but can cause major problems if a relationship ends badly. Namely, Family Sharing gives all the control to one parent, not to both equally.
The parent not identified as the organizer is unable to withdraw their children from this control, even when they have a court order granting them custody.
As one woman’s story shows, this can allow the feature which allows it to be weaponized by an abusive former partner. Wired reports.
The lack of dual-organizer roles, leaving other parents effectively as subordinate admins with more limited power, can prove limiting and frustrating in blended and shared households. And in darker scenarios, a single-organizer setup isn’t merely inconvenient—it can be dangerous.
Kate (name changed to protect her privacy and safety) knows this firsthand. When her marriage collapsed, she says, her now ex-husband, the designated organizer, essentially weaponized Family Sharing. He tracked their children’s locations, counted their screen minutes and demanded they account for them, and imposed draconian limits during Kate’s custody days while lifting them on his own […]
After they separated, Kate’s ex refused to disband the family group. But without his consent, the children couldn’t be transferred to a new one. “I wrongly assumed being the custodial parent with a court order meant I’d be able to have Apple move my children to a new family group, with me as the organizer,” says Kate. But Apple couldn’t help. Support staff sympathized but said their hands were tied because the organizer holds the power.
The standard advice in these circumstances is to simply abandon the accounts and start again with new Apple IDs. However, this not only means losing all purchased apps, but more importantly photos and videos which may represent many years of memories.
As the piece notes, Kate’s story is far from unique. Wired says that Apple declined to comment.
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