Reports said that the patent, filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, provides “Text-based communication control for personal communication devices.”
Called the "anti-sexting” patent in tech circles, the description further spells out its “parental controls”: The application “Filters incoming and/or outgoing text communications based on administrator-defined criteria, alerting the user, administrator or other designated individuals when a message contains unauthorized content. The control application can require the user to replace the unauthorized text, automatically delete the text and even strike the entire communication.”
In plain English this means certain words that are sexual in nature will be prevented from being sent or displayed.
The patent does however allow for certain text elements that are necessary to learn foreign languages, for example, a certain number of Spanish words per day can be included in messages for a child learning the language.
When Apple announced its iPhone 4 last April, CEO Steve Jobs made it clear to concerned customers that there would be no porn apps developed for the device.
Jobs said, "You know, there's a porn store for Android. You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That's a place we don't want to go — so we're not going to go there."
