11 ms·

Ask HN: Which tools are the best for internet safety for kids?

• DeanGadberry 3y ago
  I love the PI-hole route. I am not to this point with my kids, but have planned to install the PI-hole when I get to this point.
• asne11 3y ago
  You think you can protect them, but you can't. The best thing you can do is create an environment where they feel comfortable coming to you when they mess up. Show genuine interest in their activities, and equip them to make their own decisions when using the internet.
  • DavideNL 3y ago
    > "You think you can protect them, but you can't." While what you say is a good idea, i think it's not as black and white as "you can" or "you can't"; You can have some form of ... "technical protection" also, knowing it's not perfect.
  • yau8edq12i 3y ago
    You can't prevent home invasions altogether (someone can always bring a rocket launcher to blow your door off), so why bother locking your front door?
    • JamesSwift 3y ago
      But its not a near-guarantee that locking the door will be good enough. What percentage of homes do you think are broken into by force? What percentage of kids do you think will ultimately circumvent your restrictions? I think its a very high likelihood they will access the information using another avenue (at friends house, on a different device, etc). So you are back at square 1 in terms of actually preparing your kid for life.
      • slothtrop 3y ago
        > I think its a very high likelihood they will access the information using another avenue (at friends house, on a different device, etc). You're calling it "information" as though what concerns parents is tantamount to eating from the tree of knowledge. You have to account for frequency, because this isn't a question of finding out some dark truths, it's concern that they would recreationally watch content that is not fit for kids, which may have negative impacts especially if consumed on a regular basis. How many hours did you spend trying to pirate pornography as a kid? Did that have a positive impact on your life? I can answer that readily for my part.
        • JamesSwift 3y ago
          I dont mean to imply anything about what you are protecting them from, and I dont know what the OP's end goal even is. Merely pointing out how inevitable life is, so dont try and solve human nature with technology. Or at least dont think your technical solution has effectively solved human nature.
          • slothtrop 3y ago
            Good thing this isn't about "solving human nature", nor (as far as I'm concerned) making sure a kid never sees a tit on screen.
  • Syonyk 3y ago
    > ...and equip them to make their own decisions when using the internet. The problem here is that the tech providers have A/B tested "engagement" (overriding the will of the people using their product towards the tech providers own profit goals) on so many people that it's actually quite difficult to make one's own decisions with a default interaction these days. Some writers have been doing some work lately on the concept of "Cognitive liberty" - freedom from undesired influences on ones thinking. It's worth pondering through in how one interacts with the common services on the internet these days. But "kids" and "making wise decisions on their own" don't really go together. Not until well into young adulthood.
    • bmitc 3y ago
      Social media and most media these days are basically as addictive as drugs are, just in totally different ways. They are explicitly designed to bypass our decision making facilities and leave us craving for me. I'm totally aware of it, and I still catch myself scrolling or YouTube hopping. We need legislation that bans these behaviors that companies use to hoodwink us. They're getting away with whatever they want to do.
  • philsnow 3y ago
    > The best thing you can do is create an environment where they feel comfortable coming to you when they mess up. They also have to know that doing certain things online constitutes "messing up".
• timoteostewart 3y ago
  I am currently in the process of setting something up for our seven-year-old. My project is to set up a squid forwarding proxy server and have the family computer in the living room utilize that proxy server as its Internet connection. As usual, I am making this whole enterprise harder on myself by configuring the squid server to be able to dynamically change which WAN connection it uses dependent on which port is accessed by the client computer on my local network. Port 3128 means WAN1 (Spectrum cable), port 3129 means WAN2 (AT&T fiber). Step after that will be setting up port 3130 means outgoing VPN interface. Currently slogging through ip tables, routes, and rules, which isn’t my wheelhouse. :-D We have pi-hole too, primarily for blocking ads and call-homes.
• runjake 3y ago
  I really like NextDNS. It's almost like the Pi-Hole as a Service. It's very cheap ($1.99/mo) and has an app (macOS/Windows/iOS/Android) that provides filtering/monitoring on the go, even when they aren't at home. Also block ads and malware sites. https://nextdns.io https://nextdns.io
  • CharlesW 3y ago
    I also found NextDNS to be a great overall solution and highly recommend them. I augment NextDNS with Apple's parental controls (https://support.apple.com/en-us/105121 https://support.apple.com/en-us/105121). There's also the not-well-marketed Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 for Families, introduced 4 years ago today. I have not tried it, but it may be too simplistic for HN readers: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-1-1-1-1-for-families https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-1-1-1-1-for-families At one point I used Circle (since acquired by aura.com) as well. It was okay, but had a terrible app.
  • jdoss 3y ago
    I second NextDNS. You can have different profiles on your account so I have one just for the kids devices that is pretty locked down and one for me that is less restrictive for us adults in the family. I used to run a PiHole a few years back, but having NextDNS on the go is very very nice. I think my only gripe is it blocks a lot of email unsubscribe links so I have to allow list them to unsubscribe and some wifi hot spots with captive portals (like when flying) breaks third party DNS providers, so I have to turn it off to connect.
    • philsnow 3y ago
      Between Multi-Account Containers (separate browser containers for more or less every single domain), using pihole for DNS, uBlock Origin, and Privacy Badger, I scarcely ever know right away why various sites don't work for me. I can sometimes be arsed to disable stuff until it works, but often it's a good pause where I consider whether I give enough of a crap about the site to bother.
    • runjake 3y ago
      Yes! Great point! The profiles feature of NextDNS is huge. I have separate NextDNS profiles for kids, adult, IoT gear, smart TVs, and other stuff I don't trust.
• ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
  Best thing you can do is to put the computer in the living room, not their bedroom. Followed by blacklisting at the router level.
  • gr8r 3y ago
    Good idea. Along similar lines, we are thinking the TV also goes to a room. I think the kids use the TV (which is exclusively YouTube these days?) more than us parents (Even the kids do not use the TV that much).
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• AbuAssar 3y ago
  you can start with this free family dns, that blocks harmful content and enforce safe search: https://cleanbrowsing.org/ https://cleanbrowsing.org/
  • ramayac 3y ago
    Looks very complete, another alternative can be nextdns (I use that myself, and it's only $20 USD a year, almost free if you never hit the quota). https://nextdns.io/ https://nextdns.io/
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• bombcar 3y ago
  The only secure method is whitelisting (domains and IPs). It's an absolute pain the assets, however. I would go with good adblockers and a domain-tool like Pihole or similar. They usually have some decent block lists that will catch 90% of accidental attempts to visit bad places, and blocking ads cuts out 99% of the temptations there anyway. Put the computer(s) in a public place in the house, make sure they have a decently sized screen so parents walking by can see what's going on. Make sure the kids know they will never get in major trouble by telling you what is happening, and no trouble at all if someone (online) told them not to tell you - those are big red flags.
  • madduci 3y ago
    Well, even whitelisting TikTok or YouTube, you can end watching garbage/scam videos
    • bombcar 3y ago
      Yeah, for things like that you'd probably need deep packet inspection to break open the requests and narrow it down to channels. Maybe https://invidious.io https://invidious.io could be modified to only show "approved" channels?
• gr8r 3y ago
  One of the best tools is to be a role model for the kids: let them see what you use the internet for, how you use it, what you avoid and what else you use the phone/computer for. Both parents and if possible the bigger circle around the kids. Beyond that, I will look for the good replies on this post - I am leaning towards "big hammer" blocking and allowing/curating sites/videos. The Internet is a big place.
  • Brajeshwar 3y ago
    This is something I realized long back when I tried to move away from Physical Books to the Amazon Kindle. My daughter, “But you are not reading a book, you are playing or watching on your new Gadget.” I decided against that and my physical to kindle ratio is about 1:5. Same goes for phone, device, usage, etc. It is hard but I try. I'm also trying to teach my kids the idea of files and how everything on the computer are pretty much all files.
    • gr8r 3y ago
      > I'm also trying to teach my kids the idea of files and how everything on the computer are pretty much all files. Interesting. As a generation that grew up on Windows, that's probably my mental model as well. Keeping specific files like music, videos, photos organized and sharing them on pen-drives was a big thing even 10 years ago - and to an extent, this is completely gone. Can you expand why you want to teach that?
      • Nifty3929 3y ago
        For me, it's the concept of how computers actually work under the hood that I want my kids to have a grasp on. It's all files in a file system, and they all do different things. And that's different than what might be going on when you load a website, though it's all (sorta) files on the other end of that as well. Files have metadata that describes to the operating system what they are for, and how they are to be used. Etc, etc. This is information that I think will be very enlightening for them, even though not strictly required to operate a computer these days.
      • 3y ago
• JoshGlazebrook 3y ago
  Honestly, you can try as hard as you can, but they will find a way. Nothing is perfect, certainly not Screen Time. There are many threads with hundreds of people complaining about screen time settings being reverted. Half the time the activity doesn't even show up for me as a parent. It's quite honestly frustrating just how bad Apple butchered Screen Time. Be sure to restrict changing the date/time because just changing the time on your phone gets out of all Screentime time related limitations. Now let's say, you have your children's devices on their own separate SSID on its own Vlan, with some DNS restrictions, oh wait they can just turn on their personal hotspot on their phone and connect their other devices to it because Screen Time has no way of disabling that feature, and AT&T has no ability to do this on their own (Verizon can do this however). If they're old enough for a phone, they're old enough to figure out how to get around your blocks. Our 12 year old was informed of a Discord server (at school by other students) specifically for sharing proxy websites that get around website blocking on their devices. And the urls were all inconspicuous, like a website about minecraft skins has a subdomain just for hosting a web proxy. You can do your best to block, but education around bad actors and what to look out for on the internet is far more valuable here imo.
  • nedrylandJP 3y ago
    > And the urls were all inconspicuous, like a website about minecraft skins has a subdomain just for hosting a web proxy. Any schoolteacher from the last 15 years could tell you about "Cool Math Games" (contains very few math games, does host tower defense games.)
• Syonyk 3y ago
  How old are your kids? There's a difference between a teenager, and a six year old (who I'd argue shouldn't be on digital devices at all - there's far too much research on how kids brains develop from interaction with the physical world, and how the digital world shortcuts this badly, to their long term harm). The short answer is, "No, there is not. There are simply ways to make it harder." However, there's no shortage of companies happy to sell you things they claim will do that - impossible though it is, having been a kid, and having done a lot of network related work in my years. What you can do is provide an environment in which it's harder (not impossible - simply harder!) to run across stuff unintentionally, and ensure that computing hardware is an environment where it's more difficult to start intentionally bypassing boundaries set up. A Pihole is a good start, but it's also trivial to bypass unless you lock down your network pretty hard, prevent external DNS servers from being usable (blocking UDP/TCP 53 outbound from everything but the pihole goes a long way here), and manage to block DNS over HTTPS (which is a bloody nightmare), as well as external SSH connections you can SOCKS proxy over. Assuming there's a good endpoint. However, the Pihole will help keep the amount of crap down, and should do a decent job (with proper blocklists) of helping prevent unintentionally following links one doesn't care to follow (think "hosts entries to block certain goat and tub sites," if you were on the internet in the early 2000s). Any computer a kid is using needs to be in a public space in the house, with decent foot traffic, and you should ask them what they're doing often enough that it's clear you're paying at least some attention. No cell phones with browsers or mobile devices until they're quite a bit older (mid teens, maybe?). If they need a cellular device, get them a flip phone. And then beyond that, it's going to be kid specific. And make sure there are plenty of things to do that don't involve computers in their lives. The book that just came out, "The Anxious Generation," by Haidt, goes into some detail on the results of our experiments of more or less unlimited internet warfare on the development of kids, and the results are an absolute disaster, especially for tween/teen girls (in terms of mental health, suicide, happiness, human connection... pick your metric, it's been a disaster for them). And if you think this is over the top, go spend some time on r/Parenting and look for posts by teachers talking about the sort of absolutely absurd stuff they see on phones from kids in grade school and middle school...
  • ignoramous 3y ago
• Brajeshwar 3y ago
  I've tried hosted Pi-Hole and AdGuard Home. They are good as long as I'm around to fix stuffs. Then I tested something which can be global (home) and also for individual devices -- Control-D, NextDNS, and Adguard DNS. All of them works pretty well. If I really have to choose, then it would be in the order of NextDNS > Control-D > AdGuard DNS. Affiliated with none, and have decided to subscribe to all three to further test them for this year. My eventual plan is to have a tool that works independently for each devices and home-ish setup that I can keep tinkering while taking care of the home-devices that stays home. https://controld.com https://controld.com https://nextdns.io https://nextdns.io https://adguard-dns.io https://adguard-dns.io
• tjpnz 3y ago
  We use Pi-hole for blocking Meta and other shit. It's also pretty decent at blocking ads. This is all based on blacklisting so is far from infallible. You'll still need to take some interest in what your kids are up to.
• ipaddr 3y ago
  What age(s)? What is your goal? Protect from accidental click? Prevent determined child? What is certain sites? X-rated? Political views different than your own? Only allowing religious content? White listing for total control but high effort and use a black list less control but less effort. You could always not allow usage without a parent present but that's extremely high effort.
  • Desafinado 3y ago
    They're very young now, so in the beginning my hope is to have any type of device locked down to essentially just educational games and content. As they get older I'd expect to be less restrictive, for now I just want to make sure that their access is limited when they're young, but they do still have access to a keyboard. My thinking was whitelisting in the beginning, but I'm not sure what I actually want to allow access to.
    • Syonyk 3y ago
      I don't know what "very young" is, but I'd assume "Under 8" or so. At which point, they don't need digital devices. Take the time and effort you'd spend on that and buy them legos or something age-suitable, and keep them in the physical world as long as you possibly can.
      • StockHuman 3y ago
        Hard agree; there is no reason anyone under ten even needs to know the internet exists. It’s a disservice to their development as well.
      • stickfigure 3y ago
        You make it sound like it's all-or-nothing. IMO electronic literacy is also valuable. I don't want my 6yo spending all day on minecraft and youtube, but I also don't want him spending all day playing with legos. I want him to get outside some too. And do his homework. And help in the kitchen. And... the list is long. My kid has a tablet, but we limit the amount of time he spends on it. Seems healthy to me.
• tootie 3y ago
  Good parenting. Just tell them that a lot of the internet is nonsense, a lot of people lie or make up stories for laughs or drama. Show them some good quality channels that are broadly appealing (my kids like hobby channels, cooking stuff, some inoffensive humor). We've never bothered with any sort of site blocking or even screen time limits. I genuinely think it's pointless if not counterproductive.
• mzs 3y ago
  computer in the living room where anyone can see, no cell service, logging on your AP The no cell service will be the most difficult, we gave-in to pressure from grandmother, it was a mistake.
  • rcpt 3y ago
    Get a smartwatch for calls
• starfleet_bop 3y ago
  Education
• bdw5204 3y ago
  I'm surprised people who grew up with technology didn't learn from their own experience as a kid that censorware doesn't work and kids will always find a way to circumvent it if they want to. The best you can do to protect kids online is to teach them the importance of online anonymity, why ad blocking is essential and how to avoid infecting a computer with malware. Also, the internet is currently being scapegoated by the media for the teen mental health crisis but this is only happening in the US and other countries also have teens with internet access. Just like school shootings, this problem is being blamed on scapegoats because the real causes of the problem are politically untouchable and want to deflect the blame on anything else to stay that way. The moral panic over teens and social media is really just the "Grand Theft Auto is turning kids into murderers" of this generation.
  • Syonyk 3y ago
    > Also, the internet is currently being scapegoated by the media for the teen mental health crisis but this is only happening in the US and other countries also have teens with internet access. [Citation needed] The teenage mental health crisis is across a wide range of countries, all starting roughly with the smartphone. Here's one discussion on Nordic countries that demonstrates a rise in teen mental health issues at exactly the same time we saw in the US: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/international-mental-illness-part-two https://www.afterbabel.com/p/international-mental-illness-pa... - and the data for various other European and Asian nations all looks about the same. Of course, if you've started with the conclusion that smartphones and social media can't possibly be the problem, you'll be able to deflect anything away from that particular cause.
    • csnover 3y ago
      > Of course, if you've started with the conclusion that smartphones and social media can't possibly be the problem, you'll be able to deflect anything away from that particular cause. Similarly, starting with the conclusion that smartphones and social media must be the problem, you’ll deflect away from a lot of contradictory evidence that suggest a more complex interplay between other societal issues, and that smartphones/social media are—if anything—likely just illuminating and amplifying known and pre-existing root causes of poor mental health in young people: poverty, trauma, discrimination, and pressure to excel[0]. Literature reviews of social media and smartphone use show “conflicting small positive, negative and null associations” and “do not offer a way of distinguishing cause from effect”[1]. Some hypothesised alternative causes of increases in depressive and anxiety symptoms with some stronger effect sizes include: increases in online bullying, decreases in sleep, long-term effects of the Great Recession (and, by extension, the European debt crisis), biological changes[2], restrictions on independent activity[3], and climate change[4]. Even before the invention of the smartphone, psychopathologies in young Americans had increased by a full standard deviation[5] over the previous 70 years. The number of teens that report extremely high levels of stress doubles during the school year[6], yet there is little blame currently being cast in that direction, despite it being the overwhelmingly largest self-reported source of stress at 83%. Claiming causation from such weak evidence is not merely foolish, it’s potentially quite dangerous. Despite the parent commenter’s incorrect claim that this is purely an American issue, they are almost certainly correct that smartphones and social media are currently being used as scapegoats so society can avoid confronting and addressing the deeply entrenched and deeply uncomfortable root causes of harm. I think this can be seen, at least in part, in the casual discarding of evidence that—especially for marginalised groups[7]—access to online spaces can be protective to young peoples’ mental health. Trying to avoid discussing the root problems is bad enough on its own, since it means they will not be fixed, but the proposed solution of using restrictive mediation—that is, shielding young people from harm rather than educating them—is almost certainly worse than doing nothing at all[8]. [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31697105/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31697105/ [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8221420/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8221420/ [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7015269/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7015269/ [3] https://gwern.net/doc/psychiatry/depression/2023-gray.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/psychiatry/depression/2023-gray.pdf [4] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00059-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00059-3 [5] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19945203/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19945203/ [6] https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2013/stress-report.pdf https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2013/stress-r... [7] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305121988931 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305121988931 [8] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360131520302244 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...
• dmd 3y ago
  How about https://controld.com/parental-controls https://controld.com/parental-controls ?
• exolymph 3y ago
  My kid is only 11 months old, but I worry about this a lot. My parents gave me all the talks that you're supposed to and attempted to supervise my online activities (though they were woefully out of their depth and I was very sneaky). Despite their best efforts, I still self-groomed via social media, then managed to find predators who were eager to take it to the next level.
• explorigin 3y ago
  tl;dr; pihole, qustodio, device & network policies For my young, innocent children, my goal was to protect from accidental clicks. Ad-blocking DNS (pihole, NextDNS) is very effective for that. Then they got a little older and had friends showing them gore and horror things (because they had unlimited access). This was not age-appropriate content and resulted in multiple sleepless nights as they tried to process the images. Not wanting to perpetuate the cycle, I installed Qustodio on their Android devices. I'm satisfied with that. I recently bought a Synology RT6600ax and love it. It gives the ability to assign different devices to different sets of network rules so I can customize my parenting to my children as they go through different developmental phases. Having this is a good complement to qustodio because you can configure it to shut off internet for all devices in one place. It does take a technical user to use it to it's potential though.
• treetalker 3y ago
  If they have their own iPhones/iPads and use mobile Safari, 1Blocker is great for blocking ads and adult sites, and for other white- and black-listing on Safari. It won’t work if your kids install and use another browser on the device (iCab, Firefox, etc.), but I suppose you could lock down app installations on whatever iCloud account is set up on the device (or with Parental Controls). The subscription is fairly inexpensive and the app’s blacklists are updated regularly. As a bonus, it blocks in-app tracking. (No affiliation, just a happy user.)
• sn9 3y ago
  Analog tools: * Not buying them smartphones or tablets or laptops. * Only allowing them access to a desktop PC (or even a Raspberry Pi) with a large monitor in a public space like the living room. You don't have to watch over their shoulder, but there's only so many things they'll look at while worrying about "being caught". And if they have problems with excessive usage that interferes with their other responsibilities or just the house rules, you can just take the power supply.
• senectus1 3y ago
  (especially given the recent price increase) I hate having to recommend this, but pay for youtube premium (family edition), you'll get 6 accounts in the fam sub. I use one fore each of us and one for the family TV account. Then setup each kid with their own accounts and add them to the fam sub. 1) this removed the absolutely revolting adverts. and revolting aside, it stops the videos being interrupted. Kids these days self educate with youtube videos (my sone taught himself to code via youtube videos). you dont want adverts interrupting that process. (I live in hope that one day youtube will let premium subscribers turn off "shorts") 2) log into the kids youtube accounts after they have gone to bed every few days and unsubscribe them from the rubbish you know they'll click the sub button for, and then subscribe them to things you'd like them to see more often. They will have no idea you;re guiding their viewing experience.