Cannot clear my cookies in child's Safari on Mac/iPad even with screen time disabled.

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Level 1

4 points

Cannot clear my cookies in child's Safari on Mac/iPad even with screen time disabled.

I want to clear my son's internet history and cookies on his Mac mini (late 2012) and iPad (5th Gen), but the clear history choice always stays grayed out.

If I select to remove all cookies in Safari on the Mac, it does nothing.

I've read that allowing all websites in the Screen Time settings will allow the history to be deleted. It does not. Disabling Screen Time all-together doesn't fix the issue either.

Any help would be appreciated.

Mac mini, macOS 10.15

Posted on Mar 1, 2021 12:20 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Joseph_S.

Community Specialist

Mar 3, 2021 10:33 AM in response to WEDavis

Hey there WEDavis,

Thanks for reaching out to the Apple Support Communities. We understand you're unable to clear the history and website data on your son's devices, and we'd be happy to help.

To get started, on the Mac mini if you click the Apple menu at the top left corner of the screen and choose System Preferences > Screen Time > Content & Privacy, is 'Limit Adult Websites' or 'Allowed Websites Only' enabled here? If so, try setting this to Unrestricted Access, and see if the setting is still disabled.

On the iPad, this setting can be found in Settings app > Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions > Content Restrictions > Web Content.

For more details, check out this link here under "Prevent web content": Use parental controls on your child's iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch - Apple Support

We hope that helps.

Have a great day!

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Answer 2

WEDavis Author

Level 1

4 points

Mar 3, 2021 10:48 AM in response to Joseph_S.

I was able to fix this last night, but not by setting to unrestricted access.

I noticed that it also would not allow me to sign my son off of either device (I though maybe setting unrestricted access and then signing back on might fix it.)

I did some reading on how to fix that issue and figured out the solution.

In order to clear the internet history/cookies, and to be able to sign out of the device you have to deactivate Screen Time entirely. As soon as I deactivated it, it allowed me to clear everything. When I reactivated Screen Time, it made me choose the hours again, but did remember the rest of my settings.

It would be nice if it were easier. I think Safari should just prompt for the screen time code if I choose to clear the internet history. I guess the best part of it being difficult is that a child would have a hard time clearing the history even if they knew their parent's code.

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Cannot clear my cookies in child's Safari on Mac/iPad even with screen time disabled.

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