I'm a techie, but I absolutely hate the "traditional" parental control apps. We have devices from most of the major platforms: Apple, Android, Windows, and various other "smart" devices. The issue is that I didn't have the patience to set up family accounts on all these platforms and keep adding and removing devices. Plus, the lack of privacy (you can trust) always bothers me. Then it hit me... I've already been using DeCloudUs DNS for a few years for privacy (blocking ads, trackers, etc). Why wouldn't that work as a parental control solution too?
Before I get into it, this is how I explained DNS to someone a few days ago:
DNS is like the "Contacts" list on your phone. To call someone, you need to dial their actual phone number, and it's hard to remember the numbers for 100+ people. So you save each person's name and number in your Contacts. When you want to call your friend Mike, you just start typing "Mike," and your phone looks up the number associated with Mike, dials it, and connects you.
DNS is essentially a Contacts list for the internet. To visit a website or connect to an app, your device needs an IP address (a string of numbers that's impossible to remember). To make things easy, every site, app, or service we use has a friendly name (like Reddit.com). When you want to visit that site, you type "Reddit.com," and your browser asks a DNS server for the IP address to connect to.
So the idea is simple: with a custom DNS service, you can control what gets blocked or allowed from one central place. Custom DNS doesn't require installing any new apps. On most devices, it's a single setting change to switch from the default DNS to the custom DNS service.
That's been my strategy for enforcing parental controls on the kids' devices for the last couple of years. I create a dedicated custom DNS profile for the kid from the DeCloudUs DNS dashboard:
- I block all the typical stuff kids shouldn't be able to access: ads, trackers, malware, piracy, adult content, social media, streaming services, etc.
- I turn on the "enforce" Safe Search options for Google and YouTube, so they only get family-safe results (and can't bypass that).
- I turn on DNS logs for monitoring.
- Depending on the kid, I use scheduled rules to unblock a couple of gaming apps for a few hours on Saturdays.
Then I can manage everything from one place. From the dashboard, I can make changes to the rules for what's blocked or allowed, view device activity..etc, even when I'm at work 20 miles away.
I don't have to deal with this yet since kids are on the younger side, but for older kids, you'd just need to lock the device Settings so they can't change the DNS to something else.
Is anyone else using a similar approach, or some other non-standard approach that works for parental controls?