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One of the most popular mobile platforms, iOS by Apple, has taken a big step forward in placing more emphasis on the tools parents have at their disposal to more easily manage their child devices with the introduction of “Apple for Kids”.

Although this feature to manage a family accounts was introduced in iOS 8, many parents often struggle deploying and managing the feature. This new portal seems to be designed to simplify and aggregate all the content a parent might need when managing their child’s device[s].

Some of the things you’ll be able to fine on this portal include things like:

• How to work with Family Sharing
• Setting up a Child’s Device
• Setting up a Child’s Account on a Mac
• and more..

But it also highlights important features you might not be aware of, like:

• How to approve purchases;
• Locating missing devices (we know they always lose their devices);
• And how to make shared purchases;
• and more…

We really like the steps Apple is taking here to pull this to the forefront. For too long it felt as an after thought and we have worked with numerous parents struggling with what many might consider a simple task. Introducing a page wholly focused on educating parents, is amazing and we hope others will follow suit.

Take some time to play with their portal and feel free to share with them on ways they can improve to better serve parents.

This article is for non-technical users, specifically individuals that understand that the web is vast, but want technology to help them filter out the noise.

Whether you’re looking to work with our Free or Paid filters (learn the difference), how you configure CleanBrowsing is almost always identical.

Know the Desired End State

Focus on your desired end state. Are you doing this for a home? Are you doing this to protect all the devices you own? Are you doing this for yourself? Understanding the desired end state will help guide you in making the right deployment decision.

This matters because it helps you think through your deployment strategy. For instance, if you want to cover your entire home we always recommend starting at your router (we have a number of guides to help with this). But if you’re concerned with mobile devices (like phones) moving around you might want to augment that set up with local configurations as well.

We prepared an article to help you think through this process – Where Should I Configure CleanBrowsing?.

CleanBrowsing is a Networking Solution

First, CleanBrowsing is a networking option and depends on something known as the Domain Name System (DNS) to function. What this means to you is that any device (e.g., mobile phone, computer, TV, refrigerator, server, etc…) that connects to the internet can be configured to use this service as it almost always uses DNS.

All configurations can always be done manually as long as whatever device you’re working on has a network settings option. Where this is located is going to be highly dependent on the device you are using.

Second, not all devices are created equal. Just because a device shows you a network settings option doesn’t mean that the software that powers that device respects the changes.

Third, in most instances it can take as little as 5 minutes to configure. It typically does not require an app to be configured, but we do offer a few for the more common platforms. It can, however, take a bit longer depending on what is going on with your device and network.

The more common issues arise when you have multiple content filtering services running, your ISP has a network restrictions that prevents changes, or incorrect configurations (adding the DNS in the wrong sections).

Getting Started

This is not to dishearten any users. It is to set a basic foundation, and level set expectations, in the hopes of helping to make your experience seamless. To assist, we’ve prepared guides to help configuring the Free and Paid service.

If you have any questions, you can reach us on this community forum or via email at support@cleanbrowsing.org

A common problem we see with users of the service is confusion between deploying CleanBrowsing on a device (e.g., Windows, Mac) or on the network router. What is the right deployment?

We recommend router deployments to cover the whole network. You can deploy on devices individually, and that can complement your router configuration.

We’ll explore both configuration options in this article. The best way to think both configurations is as complimentary to each other.

Device vs Router Deployments

Where you deploy CleanBrowsing is completely dependent on what your intentions are. Below we will provide a few examples.

Type of User	Device	Router
Parent	If a child has a mobile device that leaves the home network, configuring locally will help ensure they have a safe browsing experience regardless of network they join.	Will ensure every device at home is protected while they are on the network. This applies to all Internet of Things (IoT) devices like game consoles (e.g., XBox, Playstation, etc..), TV’s and laptops.
School	If you are issuing school computers, and tablets.	When students are at school every device will be picked up by the edge configuration.
Business	Configure on devices if they are issued, or via your company VPN so that you ensure that while they are on your network they are provided a safe-browsing experience.	Configure at the edge of your network so that when they are on the network they are provide safe browsing experiences.
Religious Institutions	Not applicable, unless you’re providing devices to your congregation.	Configure at the edge of your network so that parishioners are provided a safe-browsing experience while on your Wi-Fi.
Municipality	Configure on devices if you are issuing your employees government devices and they switch between cellular and Wi-Fi connections.	Configure at the edge of the network. This is applicable if you’re deploying this to your pool of employees, or if you’re deploying a city-wide public Wi-Fi hotspot.

Devices Require More Attention

Although we provide comprehensive guides for iOS and Android devices, their deployments can be tricky for some users. The issue might come in the device owner being able to disable, or uninstall the service.

This is why it’s important that parents, specifically, take a proactive approach to managing their devices. Conglomerates like Google and Apple build their technologies in such a way that they assume every user is a responsible Adult. They assume everyone is mature enough and entitled to their privacy, which results in devices that provide an all or nothing like experiences for users.

Most device owners have full control of their devices. This means that regardless of the service, tool, app you deploy, a device owner is able to undo whatever configuration is implemented. This is a bit different for organizations like schools, libraries, and government institutions. In many instances they have the ability to harden their devices.

Parent, however, do not often have that luxury. So when deploying CleanBrowsing locally on your device, be sure pay special attention to how to stop device owners from stopping or uninstalling the service.

Complementary Solutions

The net net of this article is that you can deploy it on both, devices and the router. Both deployments will complement each other.

The router will cover the entire network, while the device will cover the device only.

If you have a home, it’s advised to configure it on the router by default to cover the entire home. If you have children with devices, you can configure them on their devices so that when they leave the home they are protected.

Image search is an useful way to find content online. Unfortunately, image search can often generate some explicit surprises that young kids are not ready for.

Image Search Dangers

Searching for images is a fun way to quickly find visual results for what you are looking for. You can easily find maps, equations and graphs for almost any content. The problem, is that buried within the clean results, you may get explicity images.

The other concern is that depending on the search, explicit & adult content may be displayed right away. Not a good surprise to have.

Image Searching for Kids

Young kids

https://www.kiddle.co – For young kids (under 10-11), we recommend Kiddle for their searches online. It blocks most suspicious keywords, including scary images and adult content. It is very restrictive, but works for most of what kids look for (homework, games, etc).

k-12 kids

https://google.com – For kids that are a bit older, Google’s search engine is actually one of the best and offers a strong way for parents to enforce Safe Search. If you are using CleanBrowsing, that’s auto-enforced, so your kids are good to go, and if you are not, you can configure it manually by following these steps.

Want to prevent your kids from going to unsafe image search sites? Give CleanBrowsing a try. It only takes 5 minutes to enable it by following these instructions.