A suggestion to get Apple out of the censorship business
After reading Trent Reznor’s expletive-filled mini-rant about Apple’s App Store approval process, which I basically agreed with, it got me to thinking: why does Apple want to be the decency police in the first place?
Apparently, when you submit your app to the App Store, they have people using it and looking for naughty words interspersed in the language, or looking for bare breasts (oh no…the horror), or they are judging the overall functionality of the App based some loose and unknown standards. You can probably guess that my personal opinion is that any and all apps should be allowed, unless they are violating specific laws, but I am not conceited enough to think that my standards should be applied to everyone else, so I agree that there needs to be a solution.
Personally, I think what Apple does well is write great software and build great products. I also think they suck at determining what is offensive and what isn’t, and quite frankly, I think everyone sucks at that. More to the point: putting themselves in this position only brings them bad publicity. Either they will piss off conservatives who think they are allowing too much horrible stuff that scars the children, or else they will piss off free speech advocates who believe that responsibility for judging decency falls on the individual and are paranoid about a 1984-esque future. In short, from the corporate perspective, there’s no way to win.
Rumors are that version 3.0 of the iPhone software addresses this issue to some degree. But, in the meantime, here’s how I think this problem should be solved.
When it comes to U.S. law, things like defining obscenity are obviously governed by the Supreme Court. In the famous 1973 Miller v. California decision, Warren Burger wrote:
The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be (a) whether the “average person, applying contemporary community standards” would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest…
I know that subsequent Supreme Court decisions have modified the “community standards” concept, instead using the term “reasonable person”, but that seems like splitting hairs to me. What defines “reasonable”, if not “community standards”? No matter how you slice and dice it, the point is that obscenity and decency are slippery terms, and they change with the time and place. And Apple, quite obviously, is not qualified to judge what “community standards” actually are.
But it occurs to me that one entity is able to define said standards, and that entity is the community. Seeing as the entire iTunes store platform is built on top of the Internet, which is…a community…it would seem that this problem is pretty easy to solve.
Just for fun, here’s how I’d attack it.
Create a control filter.
Add some kind of control to the account holder. Rumor has it that version 3.0 of the Apple software will do just this: add a parental control to the software. That’s a great idea, although it doesn’t necessarily remove Apple from the role of decency police. How I’d handle it is that whoever holds the credit card (presumably an adult) has the power to set an “age limit” on each account it controls. So, if you want your 11 year-old to browse as an 11 year-old, you can set her account to 11. If you want to baby her, or if you feel that everyone else’s idea of “11″ is too liberal, you can set it to 8 or 9. The point is, that’s up to you, as the credit card holder, and parent. While browsing the store, the person will only be able to see equal to or under the number set on their account. If it’s 11, then they can see any product marked at 11 or below. Simple.
Set initial product rating high.
All new games and applications that are added to the App Store are initially set at “18+”. I figure, at 18, you can go off to war and get shot, and you can buy a house, so I think that qualifies you to be able to say “fuck” and look at naked ladies if you want to. And, there’s no preferential treatment. When I release my game “Happy Bunny Jump Rope”, where you play as a cute little bunny rabbit that jumps rope and gets super flower and marshmallow power-ups on the way to Sweet Town, it’s marked as 18+. The same goes for my other app, “Bikini Bingo”, where you play Bingo until you win, and then if you you get to watch a bikini girl dance suggestively for you while she yells “Bingo!”. Ditto with that: 18+. And my third app? In “Hitler Loves Sheep”, you play as Hitler, and you run around and have sex with as many sheep as you can before the time expires. During each level you acquire tools, and then you have to try to deactivate the chastity belt of the super-sheep “boss” character so you can copulate with it. Needless to say, that’s also 18+.
Provide scoring mechanism.
All credit card holders (again, the adults), can rate the games or apps they have downloaded or purchased on a sliding scale from, let’s say age 5 to age 18. Notice I said “credit card holders” and not “account holders”. If you’re a kid, and you downloaded a game via the account your parents have set up for you, you do not see the rating controls. Just as in life, kids don’t determine the “community standards”; adults do. The UI can be a simple slider that they drag. So, maybe I’ll rate “Happy Bunny Jump Rope” as “5″, which really means anyone (the lowest age available). Maybe Bikini Bingo comes in at 12 or 13. And, Hitler Loves Sheep…OK that’ll stay at 18+.
Establish scoring standard.
This is the most important part, because it’ll determine community standards. What I propose is that some very high percentage, say 80% (the number could be up for debate), be established. The real rating for the game is whatever level more than 80% of the voters have rated the game at. So…let’s say 75% of the people rate Bikini Bingo at 12+. Well…too bad…that’s not enough. Another 4% have rated it at 13+….again, too bad, because that only equals 79. Then the algorithm checks 14+…and then…aha. We have 86% of the people saying it’s 14+. Therefore, that’s our “community standard” for Bikini Bingo, which is then available to all accounts that can see 14+ apps. Also, the rating should stay at 18+ until a certain number of votes have been logged, to prevent the early voters from affecting the result. Finally, I want to point out that people ought to be able to change their votes, and that your app’s rating could change over time.
Caveats.
I can think of one principle caveat, and that’s sandbagging. That means that I, as author of “Hitler Loves Sheep”, post something on my blog saying “hey, everyone who bought my game….go on the store and rate it at 5+!”. Now, if I’m a responsible developer, I wouldn’t do this, but nevertheless I did. I believe that Apple’s software could look for spikes in rating activity relative to the total number of sales….establish some threshold ratio that automatically triggers it as a “suspect” app for Apple to look into. Have a very real penalty for this: If you’ve been found to be sandbagging results (i.e., an Apple employee is able to take a screenshot of the blog where you told everyone to sandbag), then they can send you a letter saying, in essence, “fuck you, your app and every app you ever release, will be rated at 18+,” regardless of the established community standards.
You could also have sandbagging in the other direction, incidentally…conservative groups could lobby their followers to rate all the games on the store really low, to sanitize everything for the kids, but then again secular outlets could notice this and campaign against it, so in the end the ratings would really be reflective of society; if society’s conservative, then the ratings would tilt in that direction. If liberal, then not…but the point is it would always reflect the community standards of the world that’s active on the store, so people couldn’t really argue with the results, and I also believe that the vast majority of people would participate honestly and sensibly, knowing that they are doing something important.
The point of this is that Apple needs to get out of the censorship business. It doesn’t suit them; and it will only bring them bad PR, from one group or another. They need to establish a system that foists the responsibility for ratings onto someone else (in this case, the responsibility would lie with everyone).