3 simple steps to protect your child online: configure your wi-fi router and child’s devices with OpenDNS, and subscribe to a parental control apps.
Introduction
My child reached another milestone this academic year. She now has her own Chromebook. This is the first digital device she can call her own. I previously wrote about the online resources I used during her summer holidays. To access these, she has been using one of my wife’s or my devices. I can see she definitely enjoys having her own device. It’s almost as if she is finally joining the ranks of working adults.
Such freedom comes with risks, however. One internet security vendor carries a list of horrifying statistics about internet crimes against children. Granted, there are self-serving motives for this. However, anecdotes about cyber-bullying, sexual solicitation etc. kept me sufficiently concerned. Even if the probability of occurrence is low, the consequence of such an event could be tragically life-altering for the victims and their family.
The Department of Homeland Security has the following tips for Keeping Children Safe Online. Many of recommendations are straightforward and common-sensical. A couple, however, is quite technical. In today’s post, I would elaborate on 3 steps I took to protect my child online.
Disclosure: I receive no benefits for the following recommendations. These are simply based on my own experience as a paid-user of Norton’s various services, and a user of the free OpenDNS service.
1. Norton Family
I have been using Norton’s antivirus and internet security software for years. When my child started going online, I upgraded my subscription to include Norton Family. This includes a Parental Controls module.
Upon activating the Parental Controls module, I was prompted to “Add Child”. This is quite straightforward as it simply involves creating a profile. The next step is to specify the devices that my child uses to access the internet. The last step involves setting the House Rules in 6 different dimensions of my child’s usage of digital devices.
Choose Child’s devices
To illustrate step 2 on adding devices, my child mainly accesses the internet from my desktop, my wife’s iPad, and her own Chromebook. My desktop is an 8-year-old Windows PC, recently upgraded to Windows 10. My wife’s iPad is a 4-year old device. After installing Norton’s software on these, Norton Family managed to link these devices to my child’s profile without any issues. However, Norton’s software is incompatible with Chrome Operating System. As such, it cannot be installed on my daughter’s Chromebook.
House Rules in 6 Dimensions
After creating my child’s profile and adding devices I want Norton’s Parental Controls to monitor, I need to customize the applicable House Rules. There are 6 dimensions where such house rules can be set. These include Web access, Time, Location, Search, Video and Mobile App.
As my child does not have access to Android device, the Mobile App dimension is not applicable. We also do not allow her to bring my wife’s iPad out and about, so I turned off the Location monitor. The Search monitor is about content filtering. This prevents explicit adult-oriented content from appearing in search results in top search engines, e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. Video monitoring filters YouTube and Hulu videos, but only on browsers and not in apps.
The controls dimensions I focused on are Web and Time. For Web monitoring, Norton has 4 different default levels, depending on the child’s age. These allows an increasing number of categories of websites a child can access as she grows older.
Web-access House Rules by age
Norton Family has a set of default house rules by age:
There is also a fifth category, which is “Custom”. This is the one I opted for. In this option, I can select specific categories to allow or block. I also selected the option to “Block Uncategorized Websites”.
Other than blocking or allowing websites by categories, I can also specify any particular website I would want Norton Family to allow or block by entering the respective URL. In particular, after reading this Lifehack article, I blocked the stated URLs.
Time-access House Rules by age
Similar to Web-access, there is also a set of default House Rules for Time access by age:
Again, I opted for customization. This allows me to choose different sets of access timing for weekdays and weekends. This can vary for different devices.
What to do with Chromebook?
I mentioned above that Norton’s apps are incompatible with Chrome operating system. As such, all the settings above would be useless when my child uses her own Chromebook, which is to say most of the time these days.
A quick search online gives a very shortlist of apps for Chromebook, such as Google Family Link, Mobicip Parental Control and WebWatcher. Of these, only Google Family Link is free. All the others require subscription fees no less than what I had already paid for Norton. I think it extravagant to be spending on a duplicate set of online security subscription. Hence I decided to give Google Family Link a try.
The effort did not go far, however. While I had paid for the Chromebook, the device was managed by my child’s school. The school’s IT department had done the right thing by deactivating guest account access on the Chromebook. This means my daughter can only logon to the device using school-provided credentials. That, however, also means the email attached to the device ends with the school’s domain rather than Gmail domain. This creates a problem in trying to establish a link with Google Family Link. I tried creating a new account, but was rightly blocked by the school’s administrative controls.
2. OpenDNS to the rescue
The second step to protect my child online involves DNS: Domain Name System. After a few iterative searches to solve the Chromebook problem, I found OpenDNS. This is a CISCO-owned company that provides an website-address-book service to users. When users enters website addresses into electronic devices, these need to be translated into machine-friendly combinations of numbers. DNS is the service that helps the user’s machine communicate such website requests to the world-wide-web to locate the specific computer for the website.
For most home users, the default DNS service is provided by their internet service providers. These typically do not allow users to configure the DNS to allow for different levels of security and filtering. OpenDNS bridges this gap. According to its FAQ:
OpenDNS also offers the easiest, most cost-efficient way to prevent access to inappropriate websites, block phishing sites, and prevent virus and malware infections.
OpenDNS provides 2 free services to home users: Family Shield and Home. There are broadly two levels of settings that users can configure. These are router-settings and specific device settings. OpenDNS recommends using router-setting, as these would be applied whichever device you’re using, as long as they connect to the internet via the router. This was what I did.
To be safe, I also applied the device setting to my child’s Chromebook. This will take care of contingencies when my child uses the Chromebook outside the home environment.
3. Further router configurations
While OpenDNS can take care of website filtering, it does not provide for time-access scheduling. For this purpose, I use the administrator module of my wi-fi router. This allows me to specify time periods during which any device can access the network. The process is very much similar to that for Norton Parental Control. I also set-up the very basic parental-control service that came along with the router.
Conclusions
I managed to complete the following 3 steps to protect my child online in a matter of a few hours, including research:
- configure my wi-fi-router to include OpenDNS and time-access,
- subscribe to and setting up Norton Family’s parental controls, and
- rejigging my child’s Chromebook to set up OpenDNS.
I then tested the various devices and tried accessing different types of prohibited websites. So far, the attempts were thwarted. I will need to check the various reports over the next few weeks to check if everything is working as intended. Meanwhile, I ensure she works on the devices in the living room, supervised.
