Making national headlines, the Utah Senate passed a bill that would require cell phone and tablet manufacturers to sell devices in Utah with content filters set to on in an effort to block objectionable material. House Bill 72 had already passed the House, so it now goes to Gov. Spencer Cox. If signed, the law would be effective Jan. 1, 2022.

There may be some confusion around the bill. According to a story in the Salt Lake Tribune last week, state Sen. Jake Anderegg, representing Senate District 13, told his colleagues that the proposal won’t work because it tasks manufacturers with turning on the filters — even though the software to do so hasn’t yet been loaded onto the devices. The option to activate the adult content blockers isn’t available until further down the supply chain, he said. The ability to block adult content is part of Apple’s Screen Time, introduced with iOS 12 in 2018.

So, the good news is that if you want to block adult content, you can do it today for yourself and family members. Owners of iPhones running iOS 12 and later (we’re now on iOS 14.4 — you can check your version by going into settings, General and then About) must first turn on Screen Time. Find it about one-third of the way down the listings in Settings. Tap Turn On Screen Time and then Continue. You’ll be asked if this iPhone is for yourself or your child. If it’s for a child, you’ll need to go through the step of setting up a separate password that’s different from the one used to unlock the phone. The idea is that your child would have to ask your permission to change any of the restrictions you’ve set on his or her phone.

Tap This is My iPhone to see your options: Downtime, a schedule that allows only apps you’ve selected and phone calls to be available during certain hours and days; App Limits, which allows you to set daily time limits on your apps; Communication Limits which lets you designate certain contacts to be accessible during screen time and downtime; Always Allowed, which is just another way to allow specific apps and people during downtime; and finally, Content & Privacy Restrictions.

This is the section where you block an array of activities, such as making iTunes and App Store Purchases, and of course, access to objectionable content. Tap Content Restrictions to see an extensive list of media types like music videos, movies and apps in the App Store, which you can limit in different ways. For instance, you can choose Clean versus Explicit for music, podcasts, news and workouts, an age rating for apps and Motion Picture Association ratings for movies. Below this section you’ll see Web Content where you can adjust the filter to Limit Adult Websites. Similarly, you can adjust Siri to not accept searches with explicit language and turn off web searches altogether. This last setting will apply to Safari only, so if Chrome is installed on the phone, it will not be limited by this action.

So there you have it. You’ve now reduced objectionable content and made phone usage safer. But if we dig a little deeper, you may discover that “objectionable” is subjective, and may not meet your standards. When Screen Time was first released, The Verge reported “Apple’s content filter for kids is still letting pornographic and violent search results through.” In the story, it cited a number of searches that supported the notion that Apple’s filter was blocking the word “sex” which meant a search for “sex assault hotline” was blocked, while any phrase substituting sexual for sex, including images and videos, were accessible. This is still the case.

You have two options to improve on the filter. You can specify websites you want blocked, but this seems like an ineffective strategy to me: how would you find such sites and there are likely too many to corral. Instead you may want to consider installing a more robust app designed for this purpose. Some top-rated apps to consider are Net Nanny, Kaspersky Kids 2021 and Surfie. These apps use broader filters and usually include blocks for drugs, hateful content, violence, gambling, cyberbullying, along with porn, and are applied across social media apps as well as web searches. And while most conversations around filtering targets parents who want to protect their children, including HB 72, there’s no reason adults shouldn’t consider these measures to their own devices.