How to Make a Browser Safer for Kids with Parental Controls: Safe Search & Web Filter
Safes protects for your child across a variety of browsers, apps, devices, and operating systems. Bring all-around safety to your family’s online experience within minutes.
Browsers serve as the entry point to the online world. The internet, despite its amazing benefits, can expose anyone to certain risks.
Dangers such as digital addiction, exposure to inappropriate content, phishing, identity theft, and cyberbullying, threaten people of any age. However, children and adolescents are particularly vulnerable to these threats.
To protect your child from these dangers, you need to use parental controls and healthy boundaries. And there is no better place to start than your kid’s browsers!
How Safes Helps Your Child
• Protect from Harmful Content
Safes protects your child from inappropriate and harmful content to ensure their mental wellbeing.
• Form Healthy Digital Habits
Safes helps prevent harmful routines — i.e., video game addiction and unhealthy sleep patterns — and form positive digital habits.
• Keep Track of When & Where
Safes tells you where your child is and what they are doing with their device in real time.
• Pave the Way for Growth
Safes creates a safe and distraction-free space for your child to expand their mind and broaden their horizon.
• Create Customized Safety Plans
Your child is unique. Our flexible solution helps you create a customized digital safety plan that fits your kid’s unique needs.
Cross-platform Operation for All-Around Security
As a cross-platform parental control app, Safes protects your kid’s online experience on a variety of browsers and operating systems.
Safes is compatible with iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows. This means that regardless of the devices or operating systems you and your child are using — computers, smartphones, or tablets — you can manage and supervise your kid’s digital activities.
Additionally, Safes protects your child no matter what browser and search engine they are using. It is compatible with Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
How Safes Ensures Your Kid’s Browsers Are Secure
At the moment, Safes offers two ways to protect your child when they’re surfing the web using browsers. Let’s see what they are and how each one works.
Safe Search
Safes comes with a comprehensive data base of age-inappropriate keyword categories. Once you install Safes on your kid’s device, it filters out the inappropriate content and search results using this data. The database is crowd-sourced and regularly updated based on other Safes users’ experience.
For further customization, you can block or allow your kid’s access to certain categories and keywords.
To block or unblock keyword categories:
- Go to www.safes.so/family/login
- Enter your email and password to open your dashboard.
- Scroll down and click Safe Search from the menu on the left.
- Under the Keyword Categories on the left, you can find a list of the categories of content your child can access on the web.
- You can block or unblock your child’s access to each category by clicking on the lock icon and confirming your decision on the pop-up page.
Note: Blocked categories are marked by red lock icons while allowed categories are marked by grey icons.
Keyword Exceptions
In the Keyword Exceptions sections, you can exclude certain keywords from blocked categories as well.
For example, if you’ve blocked the Art & Entertainment category, but you want your child to be able to search for “Peppa Pig”, you can add Peppa Pig to the content exceptions list as a new keyword and choose the allow option.
Your child will be able to access Peppa Pig-related content on search engines.
To block or allow your kid’s access to individual keywords:
- Go to www.safes.so/family/login
- Enter your email and password to open your dashboard.
- On the menu on the left side of your screen, scroll down and click Safe Search.
- Under Keyword Exceptions, you can find a list of keywords. If it’s the first time you’re adding keyword exceptions, the list will be empty.
- To add new keywords to the list, click on the Add New button on the top-right corner.
- On the pop-up page that appears, enter the keyword.
- Choose Allow or Block from the options at the bottom of the pop-up screen.
- Click Add to confirm your decision.
- Once the lock icon next to the keyword turns red, your kid’s access to that keyword will be blocked. And if it’s grey, it means that the keyword is allowed in web searches.
- You can change your settings any time.
This way we minimize the risk of your kid’s exposure to age-inappropriate content on their browsers.
Web Filter
Another Safes feature you can use to apply parental controls and manage your kid’s browsers is Web Filter. Web filter allows you to block your kid’s access to certain web categories and specific websites.
By blocking a category, you block all websites that fall under that class. For example, if you block the Shopping category, your kid’s access to all online stores will be blocked except for the ones you exclude from the list.
- Go to www.safes.so/family/login
- Enter your email and password to open your dashboard.
- On the menu on the left side of your screen, scroll down and click Web Filter.
- Under the Web Categories on the left, you can find a list of different categories of websites your child can access online.
- You can block or unblock your child’s access to each category by clicking on the lock icon. Note: Blocked categories are marked by red lock icons while allowed categories are marked by grey icons.
URL Filtering Exceptions
You can also block or allow your kid’s access to individual websites of different categories by adding exceptions. This feature helps you personalize your child’s experience on web browsers and adds an additional layer of security to their online presence.
To block or allow your kid’s access to individual websites:
- Go to www.safes.so/family/login
- Enter your email and password to open your dashboard.
- On the menu on the left side of your screen, scroll down and click Web Filter.
- Under URL Filtering Exceptions, you can find a list of websites you’ve added as exceptions. If it’s the first time you’re making these exceptions, this section will be empty.
- To add new websites to the list, click on the Add New button on the top-right corner.
- On the pop-up page that appears, enter the website address (URL) you want to block or allow.
- Choose Allow or Block from the options at the bottom of the pop-up screen.
- Click Add to confirm your decision.
- Once the lock icon next to the website URL turns red, your kid’s access to that website will be blocked. And if it’s grey, it means that the website is accessible on your kid’s browser.
- You can change your URL Filtering Exception settings any time.
What Happens When Your Child Requests Blocked Keywords or Websites?
If your child tries to search for a blocked keyword or open a blocked website, the our parental control app will simply stop the process. Also, you will be alerted through push notifications that your child is trying to access blocked materials.
You can review a history of blocked material access attempts in the Activity Report and Notifications Center.
Final Thoughts on Parental Controls for Browsers
Browsers are a major access point to the online world. Therefore, it’s essential to protect children while they’re using browsers to surf the web. As a solution, some browsers offer built-in parental control features. But they are far from enough.
Safes is parental control app that allows you to monitor and manage your child’s entire digital experience, especially when they are using browsers. It ensures that your kid’s adventure in the digital world remains safe, healthy, and fun — the way it’s intended to be!
Frequently Asked Questions
Have any questions? We’re here to help!
Information or images that include violence and hate speech that upset your child, content aimed at adults, misleading information, or information that could influence your child to engage in illegal or dangerous activity are all examples of inappropriate content.
While there are no hard and fast rules as to when you should allow your child access to the internet, children’s access to digital devices in general should limited until the age of 3. After that, they can have limited supervised access to technology, including the internet. The internet can be dangerous place even for adolescents, so your parental supervision should remain in place through this stage of your child’s life.
There are two types of websites that you need to block for your kids. There are websites that include age-inappropriate or even harmful content like violence, hate speech, or self-harm. These websites are a threat to your child’s mental health.
There are also categories of websites—like online stores—that are appropriate, but can be cause issues if your child can access them without supervision. You can block your kid’s access to these websites at your own discretion.
Some parental control apps like Safes offer a database of websites divided into categories. It allows you to block website categories that you deem inappropriate quickly and easily.
Yes. You can restrict websites using the parental control features on your child’s phone or browser or by installing third-party parental control apps like Safes.
You can activate YouTube’s restricted mode using your Google account. You can also use YouTube Kids to limit the accessible content to child-friendly videos. Finally, if you come across content that you think is inappropriate, you can report it.
