My eldest, now nine, has recently found an interest in searching Google Images for things she’s interested in. This may be things she wants to draw, photos of red pandas, or images from Harry Potter. Recently, it occured to me that there’s a poossibility she could stumble across something less appropriate for a 9-year old in one of her searches. We have no parental controls or privacy filtering beyond the work Pihole handles on our home network – we’ve never needed anything before – and I don’t want to lock down all devices, only the ones that both my children use, which mainly consist of two iPads. I know Google has blurring that it now uses on some imagery however, this doesn’t deter inquistive minds from tapping the easily reachable ‘Off’ button on that.
Our home network is powered by UniFi hardware with a UDMPRO at it’s heart which doesn’t come with obvious parental controls however, there is a fairly decent family filter that can be found in the settings.
I’m not sure on the software/firmware versions required for this but at time of writing, the Network Application on my UDMPRO is at version 8.5.6 and the UniFi OS is at version 4.0.20.
Overview
To set-up Parental Controls on a UDMPRO, you’ll need to do the following:
- Create a new virtual network and set Content Filtering for that network to ‘Family’.
- Change the Virtual Network for each required device to use that new network.
Creating a New Network
- Log into the UDMPRO and go to Network.
- Go to Settings on the left sidebar.
- Go to Networks.
- Click ‘New Virtual Network’.
- Set the Network Name to whatever you like.
- Leave the router as UDMPRO.
- Click ‘Manual’ under Advanced.
- Set Content Filtering to ‘Family’.
- (Optional) Set the DHCP range to something else.
- Click the ‘Add’ button.
Change Virtual Network per-Device
- Head to ‘Client Devices’ in the left sidebar.
- Click the device you want to change.
- Click the Settings cog icon at the top of the panel that has appeared on the right.
- Click ‘Virtual Network Override’.
- Choose the virtual network name you just created.
- Click the ‘Apply Changes’ button.
- Repeat for as many devices you wisht to set this to.
That’s it! Those devices will now have a much safer web browsing/searching experience.
For bonus points, you can also create a separate ‘Guest’ WiFi network and assign the content filtered virtual network to it so that guests or visitors can connect to your WiFi but also have the same protections.
If you want to know more about how my home network is set-up, you can watch a lengthy video about it and some other stuff on my YouTube Channel.