Part 2: Dealing with Parental Controls

Authors note: This is the second in a two-part series on parental controls.

Last week I covered the parental controls featured in OS X Tiger for Mail 2.0. I showed you how to keep your child from e-mailing unknown or untrusted recipients which, hopefully, was of some benefit to you. Now as I’ve said before, the parental controls available only cover applications that come with OS X Tiger, namely Safari and Mail. No other applications can be configured from this part of OS X. With a bit of luck, the software you’re using will have it’s own parental controls feature.

This week I’m going over Safari RSS and how you can prevent your child from accessing sites you don’t trust.

Before we begin, if you haven’t done so already, I highly suggest going over my previous article of how to configure Mail 2.0 using Parental Controls. To view that article, click here.

To reiterate something I went over last week, you cannot configure parental controls on an account if the account is set as an administrator. You can, however, configure most of the applications available on the ‘Managed’ account from an Administrator account, except, Safari RSS.

Now there really isn’t anything overly difficult about configuring a managed account for Safari RSS. You’re simply going to block out unwanted websites and only allow your child - on the managed account - to access those sites you’ve accepted as ‘safe’.
In order to do this, log in to your child’s account. I recommend that when you set up the account, you make a note of his or her password.

Configuring Safari

Go to the ‘Accounts’ window (in System Preferences) and click on the account you’re currently logged in to, followed by clicking on the ‘Parental Controls’ tab at the top.

You’ll need to unlock the padlock in order for you to make any changes to the system. You will be required to fully type your Administrator username and password.

You will then be presented with the screen you saw last week.

Clicking on the ‘tick box’, to the left of the Safari icon, will enable the parental controls feature in Safari. To configure these controls, click on the ‘Configure’ button where you will then be asked to open Safari.

That’s the difficult part out of the way.

The first thing you will notice when you open up Safari in your child’s ‘managed’ account is that the little bookmarks icon in your Bookmark Bar has a padlock over it. What that’s telling us is that all those bookmarks are not accessible to this particular user.

You’ll also notice the absence of the ‘Bookmarks’ menu at the top of your Macintosh whilst Safari is open, thus further preventing your child’s account from gaining access to any saved Bookmarks.


Before Safari without Parental Controls applied (Showing Bookmarks menu)

After Safari with Parental Controls applied (Not showing Bookmarks menu)

Testing controls

Now, just to show you how this feature works, type an address you know, such as http://www.google.com into your address bar, followed by ‘return’, and see for yourself what happens.

You’ll notice Safari instantly blocking out that website with a message of what’s happening and what you can do.

It’s telling us that you cannot access this page because it’s not been stored by the Administrator within the bookmarks bar in your Safari browser - Note: the bookmarks bar is located underneath the address bar.

If you feel that this site is safe, you may click on ‘Add Website’ to add it to the bookmarks bar. Of course, to do this, you will need to enter your Administrator username and password.

Once done, Google.com will be added to your address bar allowing your child to access that website.

From this little lesson, you should now understand that if your child types in an address that is not present in the address bar, the page will not load. You may want to spend some time adding addresses into the Bookmarks bar that you deem safe.

If you wish to manually insert and remove addresses from the bookmarks bar, click on the Padlock I mentioned before which is covering up the Bookmarks button and enter your username and password. You can then begin adding addresses to the ‘Bookmarks Bar’ section.

I’m sure by now you’re asking the question, “What if my child searches for something in Google and visits a site I haven’t accepted?”  Well, the answer to that is simple. The page will not load. Any links that are available to visit through a website, such as Google, that aren’t present in the Bookmarks Bar will not load, and once again, will ask the Administrator if he/she would like to add this site to the Bookmarks Bar.

It’s also worth mentioning that this feature does allow you to view pages within a website. If you have accepted ‘www.google.com’ you will also be able to access ‘http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/’ which is a page within Google.com.

I have to stress that this is a very limiting way to look at the Internet and should only really be used if you know your child is going to be using the computer without adult supervision. If your child needs to do coursework of some description, which requires him/her to access a host of different links via Google, or another search engine, then you should allow your child full access to the Internet with your supervision. This feature is certainly a very quick way of blocking sites effectively, but it does lack configuration controls for users to block out certain types of websites, rather than certain web sites.

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