How to turn off Headphone Safety on iPhone

Oh wow. I just came across this on ios 14.3 whilst washing my car. I use bone conduction headphones, whatever SPL the phone thinks I have in my ears/speakers/stereo/ whatever, is totally not the case. Having to put the volume back up periodically so I can actually hear the music when I have wet hands is infuriating.

I am just trying to work out whether there is another angle to get rid of this annoyance by disabling apple health. I found somewhere to delete all the data from my phone from apple health, maybe that will help avoid warnings if I do that at the start of a period whenI don't want them.

I have sent feedback. I noted that that feedback site does not have ios 14.3 as a value in the drop down list. The highest is 14.2. That's pretty shoddy. Live chat told me this is a feature, I have asked for a call back from a supervisor this week.

No, I don't believe there is any EU law that makes this mandatory. Its ridiculous and I would love for someone to point me at such a law. I am a remain-er but this would set me off for sure : ) .

Finally if I have to reach for my phone every N minutes when I am driving to put the phone back to max volume so that the car's volume is correct, then this is categorically dangerous in another way.

We need a way to disable this.

// update - I can delete data in Health but can't disable or prevent it being logged. If I delete data it seems I might get 4 hours without the notification as my headphones seem to track to "99db" (right..) on max. I don't want this data logged - does anyone know if this is a GDPR issue ?

There is no law in France that requires the implementation introduced in 14.2. The French laws on audio players have been around for many years. They merely set volume limits (85dB that can be exceeded up to 100dB after a warning).

Moreover, EU iPhones have always been compliant with these French laws.

The new 14.2 Headphone Notifications cannot be blamed on French law. They are far more restrictive and intrusive than required. Apple wants them to be this restrictive and intrusive.

The most current version of the EN 50332-3 standard encodes the requirements, but it is only available for purchase; perhaps someone with access to an applicable engineering library can look up the applicable spec.

However, a slide set from a WHO talk given on March 6, 2017 states:

Mandate:

Commission Decision of June 23, 2009

Exposure to sound levels shall be time limited to avoid hearing damage.

At 80 db(A) exposure time shall be limited to 40 hours/week.

At 85 db(A) exposure time shall be limited to 5 hours/week.

Requirements (draft)

Mandatory warning for 80 dBA sound exposure level per week,

i.e. 40 hours normalized.

Gain drop until warning acknowledged

Short-term Exposure Level

Limited to 100 dB A integrated over 30s

Note the words: Gain drop until warning acknowledged.

That means the device will turn down the volume when the warning is issued, though it is left unclear whether acknowledging the warning would turn the volume back up or if the user must take action to do so.

William, with all respect, law that was set in 2013 is in place already for 7 years and all devices sold in EU after that date warn users about exceeding that level. We must distinguish 2013 regulation from current one(if there is any).

Law from 2013 - is in place. Warning to prevent accidental volume increase. There was a switch on Apple to turn it on and off back in previous iOS versions. I don't remember exact name but it was there to set a safe level of volume to prevent volume increase by mistake ex. in pocket. You had to acknowledge notification and then you would be able to exceed that. I saw this on many Samsung smartphones since long time. Nothing else then notification. I'm rarely listening to music for 20h straight so newer so it appearing again after i removed previous one.

Current law - Not sure I have not heard anything new in this matter. It seems that Apple decided on it's own to implement function like this. There is nothing that would explain some gov forced them to do so.

-edit

In regards to CENELEC EN50332-3 it describes a standard. It's not a law. If you want to have that standardization on your device you must be compliant and pay for it, but nothing says its mandatory to sell devices with that standard applied. So if in some countries we see that there is a button to turn off that headphone notification option and not in US and EU that shows that it was clearly a decision from manufacturer. If they would keep standardization it would be consistent everywhere.

Last thing if Apple would be much into standardizing their devices to EU standards why we are still using Lightning over USB-C standard and previously microUSB.

The issue is intrusion. The second issue is the product’s inability to differentiate between headphones and other Bluetooth connections. I’ve been talking to Apple Support today and they agree. They’ve referred it to the Engineers. Let’s see.

DorianDelicacy wrote:

If I'm not given the option to change this I'll never buy an iPhone again.

And no one here in this user-to-user forum particularly cares what phone you buy. However, if you'd like to let Apple know of your displeasure, use the feedback page:

Product Feedback - Apple

Scream106gti wrote:

Sadly the only help you’ll get here regarding this is to provide feedback to Apple via this link :-(

Feedback - iPhone - Apple

It's not sadly; that's the official way to provide feedback to Apple.

This site exists only to provide technical aid from Apple users to other users.

And you should deal with Apple regarding your US issued iPhone or wait for an update. Or maybe T-Mobile. I have a US provisioned phone, I have both switches and do not have this volume feature activated. If you know other people with iPhones do a little test and ask them to show you whether they have one switch or two.

Apple Care (or whatever it's called) said this is imposed upon US branded phones. Pretty sure I stated that somewhere in this mile long thread. I already reached out to them early on. That is what they said.

erimar1943,

Not one word you've written will be read by Apple. Apple is NOT here on this user to user only forum. No one from Apple will do anything because you have taken the time to write here.

You can however, share your thoughts with Apple via this link, which will be read --> Feedback - iPhone - Apple

Stevens1641 wrote:

I’m not even connected to my AirPods...I’m connected to a Bluetooth speaker in my house and it does this to me! Fix this Apple!

For the I don't know how many-eth time, Apple is not reading here for suggestions or feedback. Use the feedback page:

Product Feedback - Apple

well so they it’s most likely working is ios is polluting the volume level of the BTine out every so often. Which you can see when you look at the provided data points. When it collects that data point it then Sums them up over a time period to determine if your outside your “safe” range as directed by the overlords. When you hit your max it turns it down. Now because the health setting can determine which headphone did that data point it could Then remove data points where the device was marked as “not headphone” hence not adding it to their sums.

As workaround for this problem I’ve created a shortcut that manually adds -250db entries to health app then I assigned it to automation so each time I’m connecting to my car Bluetooth phone do it automatically. Pop ups shows rarely since then.

this is only semi solution for now in my case.

Good spot, you’re right. I changed my shortcut to record ‘headphone audio level’ and was prompted to allow access for the Health App. Let’s see if that works.

Begs the question, if I set my Health app permissions to explicitly block access to Headphone data (as it was set already) how can it ever record the info it needs to lower the volume. Is the app ignoring users permissions that they have selected?

Anyway, if this shortcut bodge works I’ll be happy enough. Will report back next week after some more driving.

I did it a bit differently.

here is my shared shortcut, you can use it or create your own based on that. To directly have negative number just copy/paste it.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/145e7db7d3d6494ebcae33b3752a0ce6