Follow-up on separating screen time usage reporting from time limits
The following discussion from !2747 (merged) should be addressed:
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@velsinki started a discussion: (+18 comments) Something that wasn't entirely obvious to me is that the Shell will track time only if Screen Time Limits are enabled. Is that fully intended?
That means the status that shows if there is no Screen Time data is a little bit ambiguous. You can wait forever, but there will be no data unless you activate the Limit.
I can definitely imagine someone also wanting to track their usage but not necessarily enforce limits.
There’s some more discussion of this in the original thread, but it can basically be summarised as:
- Some people find it confusing/surprising that screen time usage is only logged if a time limit is set.
- They would prefer it if usage could be logged independently of whether a time limit is set, so the user can see their usage and potentially set a limit based on that knowledge.
- Enabling logging by default has privacy issues, mostly around how the logging is presented to the user (“why is my computer spying on me”), rather than due to any actual information leakage (all data is stored in the user’s home directory, and pruned on a rolling basis).
One potential solution is to add another toggle which allows the logging to be enabled. Setting a limit would require this toggle to be enabled, but the converse is not true.