“Ask to Browse”: I hope Apple works with Human Rights organisations

Yesterday, I published and then removed a blog post that reflected my immediate reaction to Apple’s WWDC 2026 keynote. I decided to take a little time to reflect, before I would either set it online again, or publish a revised version. This is the revised version.

Parents know best.

This attitude triggered me, hard, while watching the keynote. I literally missed the following 30 minutes, I can’t remember any details from it. There was something about AI, but I don’t remember.

Sadly, in our current world, parents often do not know best, but they assume they do and do a lot of psychological damage to their children. I was lucky and mine didn’t, but I lived a closeted life for a couple of years, before I was ready to talk to my parents about my sexuality regardless.

It took reading other LGBTQ+ teenager’s stories online for over a year, until I was able to muster the courage to talk to my parents. In that talk, and in many situations before it, I’ve needed and used a lot of the information I could access on the internet as a teenager without my parents' knowledge. Apple’s “parents know best” approach is probably a great tagline to use to market their new parental controls, but it is neither true, nor does it respect the rights of minors.

I had friends growing up whom I know for a fact would have committed suicide without anonymous and unrestricted internet access. Their parents would be considered perfectly normal today, especially in the US and other religious and hyper-conservative countries. Yet, their parents were the most dangerous people in their lives.

Most parents probably do right by their kids, just like most people online probably never interact with the ugly parts of the internet, but saying “parents know best” without qualifying it or adding and advertising a feature for kids who need help getting protection from their parents is a move I would have never expected from a company with a gay CEO.

I hope Apple closely works with human rights groups to white-list at least 100,000 self-help websites globally. Children and teenagers must be able to access those sites without their parents knowledge or permission.