I have noticed a major issue with my iPhone. No matter what I try, I can’t open a private tab in Safari. This is not good, as it means I have to manually clear my cookies (which is impractical) or disable them altogether (which breaks some sites).

As of today, I have an adult Apple ID, but my dad is the organiser of the Apple family.

I have tried disabling content restrictions in Screen Time, but it didn’t do anything. Web Content is set to “unrestricted”.

There is no switch or button in Settings > Safari.

I have no configuration profiles installed that could change this. All I have are a few root certificates, a bunch of fonts, and an APN cert.

Private mode is fully functional in third-party browsers, but they do not support extensions or userscripts and provide marginally worse fingerprinting protection.

Can anyone help?

  • @MrPibb
    2•7 months ago

    I’m guessing the answer to this will be yes but under family sharing your account now say adult and there is no longer a passcode used to lock your screen time settings correct? I’m guessing so. So all the above being true I would try the old turn off and on trick but in this case turn on then off. I would try turning web content to Limit Adult Websites performing a iPhone force restart, after restarting edit settings back to unrestricted and performing another iPhone force restart and checking if you have access to private browsing.

    • Hellfire103OPEnglish
      1•7 months ago

      I just tried it, but still no private tabs. Thanks anyway, it was a good idea.

      As it happens, though, there is still a passcode protecting the screen time settings.

  • @[email protected]
    2•7 months ago

    As long as Screen Time is controlled by someone else on your iPhone, like a parent, then Private Tabs are disabled. They could also be disabled by a configuration profile (see Settings → General → VPN & Device Management)