3
1
Parental Controls on the Mac sucks. For my use case, anyway. I need to block a small number of sites (like youtube) and clearly adult sites as well. Parental Controls as a minimum blocks any https site in existence, including google, facebook, etc. and you need essentially approve every web site they go to which is wasting a lot of time.
Do know how to make Parental Controls on Mac really work, or what other product can be used for this purpose?
Sasha O
Posted 2013-11-17T02:47:17.300
Reputation: 161
The Mac parental control software is merely exposing to the parent the ugly truth that other parental control software tries to hide from you. None of it works. There are billions of web pages, changing all the time, and no one can actually categorise them all as child-apprpriate or not. You can either give your children a very restricted white-list of a small handful of websites and block everything else (until they work out how to bypass it, which will at least be educational for them), or you can accept that they're going to see content that you wouldn't want them to see. – Mike Scott – 2014-07-04T07:03:21.157
We're in late 2016 and it still sucks badly... – CFreitas – 2016-11-28T22:19:04.747
This is a shopping question and may not last long, but I use OpenDNS (free) to manage access at home... Handles per-site filtering and works on all devices – Brian Adkins – 2013-11-17T04:14:50.440
Thanks @BrianAdkins. Does OpenDNS allow different settings per client computer? – Sasha O – 2013-11-17T18:09:43.113
Unfortunately, no, but, if you want a non-filtered computer, just set its DNS to that of your ISP (or Google's DNS). Set your router to use OpenDNS, and all other connected devices should be protected – Brian Adkins – 2013-11-17T20:21:36.130
Dunno about the Mac proper, but they definitely suck on iOS. OpenDNS is great but lacking a major feature in not being able to have tailored 'accounts' with different levels of access. Another option to investigate is hardware-based solutions like Pandora's Hope (http://pandorashope.com/) although the religious aspect of that would put me off, frankly.
– Alan B – 2013-12-19T09:45:57.240