Having done several rounds with parental control, I'd say -- nfw. We were worried more about timesink than anything else, but over a long period of time, it mainly boils down to knowing your kids, trusting them, with checkups. The tech is just not there to actually control what happens on a device.

White listing worked for a while (months) when they were young, but it was super-high touch and stuff just broke all the time. You try to whitelist a site, but you have to then figure out all their CDNs.

Restricting specific sites works, sort of, until they find some place that hosts that content. Blocking youtube doesn't work(*), every search engine has a watch videos feature. (Why are you spending 3 hours a day on DDG?) There's really no way to segment youtube into "videos they need to watch for school" and "viral x hour minecraft playthrough". Somehow, we've managed to combine the biggest time waste ever with a somewhat useful for education hosting service.

That's leaving out the jailbreaks that come from finding an app's unfiltered webview and getting an open web escape there.

There's basically no reliable method for filtering even on locked down platforms.

* there's probably a way to kill it at the firewall based on dns, but that's iffy for phones and it's network wide.

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jfim 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's totally doable to block YouTube with pihole, and also to make it blocked only on certain devices.

You can create groups and assign devices to them, and assign the block rules only to certain groups.

The only annoyance with this is that it blocks logging into Google since they redirect to YouTube to set a login cookie as part of the Google login process. If you're already logged into Google though, everything works as normal, and you can always disable pihole for five minutes if for some reason you got logged out and need to log back in.

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ceejayoz 2 days ago | parent [-]

My kids figured out disabling Wifi disabled the Pihole within hours, and that was when they were ~9. They are intelligent opponents and a very fast moving target.

	▲	jfim a day ago \| parent [-]
		On Android, it's technically possible to use an always on VPN to still use pihole even when on cellular data, but unless there are some mdm controls on the phone, one can obviously disable the VPN.

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Terr_ 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The tech is just not there to actually control what happens on a device.

Neither is the tech for locking down all online identity to government-controlled access... But I have strong opinions about which one everybody should/shouldn't start creating!

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snthd 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe they're called parental controls because they control the parents (by limiting and bundling choices).