10 easy ways to beat internet filters
Use a friend’s smartphone. How many Internet-enabled devices are available to your child at their friend’s house? Do those friends have older siblings? These are important questions to answer.
Use mom or dad’s smartphone. Way too often, mom and dad’s phones don’t have the same protections or restrictions on them as the Internet-ready devices used by kids. Kids are very aware of this. It speaks volumes to a kid about trust and respect when he sees his parents trying to obey the same internet safety rules—even if it’s inconvenient.
Use public Wi-Fi. It’s quite easy to stand in the parking lot of your local library and use their wireless signal, even after hours. If you have your own router filtered at home, this is great, but unfiltered Wi-Fi is everywhere.
Download a VPN. A virtual private network (VPN) creates encrypted peer-to-peer connections, thereby protecting all information shared over the VPN and circumventing most any filtering on the device. VPN’s are available for laptops or downloadable as apps for iPhone or Android devices.
Use incognito or private browsing. Did you know that every major search engine has a private browsing mode? These settings cause the browser to stop tracking web history and are a nightmare for many parental control solutions. If your only internet safety strategy is monitoring search history, it’s possible you’re missing most of it.
Go online through a hidden browser. Maybe your son or daughter has an iPhone and you’ve downloaded a filtered and monitored browser, so you think you’re covered. Did you know that you can still access an unfiltered Internet search through the Weather Channel app? The Bible App? And, many, many other hidden Internet doorways. Kids know about these.
Use a free proxy website. On either a laptop or a mobile device, kids can access proxy websites through the browser and use a separate proxy to direct the data around the web filter, providing easy access.
Download a different browser. If your kid has an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, chances are you’ve used Restrictions to “limit adult content” in Safari. But, if you forget to toggle off the iTunes App Store, there are 50+ other browsers to download in order to bypass Safari.
Perform a factory reset. iPhones with restrictions enabled can be reset by connecting the phone to a computer and using iTunes. It’s not a popular thing to do, since it restores the phone to its factory settings, but for a kid trying to skirt the controls, it’s a viable option.
Search through Google’s “related images.” Even with restrictions enabled on an iPhone, if you access a Google search bar through a hidden location (see #6 above), you can access inappropriate images through Google’s “related images” under an image that is clicked on. These “related images” don’t always obey the “safe search” rules as the original Google search.
For an ongoing solution to these issues, go to the rest of this article by Chris McKenna at Protect Young Minds: protectyoungminds.org/2017/01/19/10-ways-kids-beat-internet-filters/
Use a friend’s smartphone. How many Internet-enabled devices are available to your child at their friend’s house? Do those friends have older siblings? These are important questions to answer.
Use mom or dad’s smartphone. Way too often, mom and dad’s phones don’t have the same protections or restrictions on them as the Internet-ready devices used by kids. Kids are very aware of this. It speaks volumes to a kid about trust and respect when he sees his parents trying to obey the same internet safety rules—even if it’s inconvenient.
Use public Wi-Fi. It’s quite easy to stand in the parking lot of your local library and use their wireless signal, even after hours. If you have your own router filtered at home, this is great, but unfiltered Wi-Fi is everywhere.
Download a VPN. A virtual private network (VPN) creates encrypted peer-to-peer connections, thereby protecting all information shared over the VPN and circumventing most any filtering on the device. VPN’s are available for laptops or downloadable as apps for iPhone or Android devices.
Use incognito or private browsing. Did you know that every major search engine has a private browsing mode? These settings cause the browser to stop tracking web history and are a nightmare for many parental control solutions. If your only internet safety strategy is monitoring search history, it’s possible you’re missing most of it.
Go online through a hidden browser. Maybe your son or daughter has an iPhone and you’ve downloaded a filtered and monitored browser, so you think you’re covered. Did you know that you can still access an unfiltered Internet search through the Weather Channel app? The Bible App? And, many, many other hidden Internet doorways. Kids know about these.
Use a free proxy website. On either a laptop or a mobile device, kids can access proxy websites through the browser and use a separate proxy to direct the data around the web filter, providing easy access.
Download a different browser. If your kid has an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, chances are you’ve used Restrictions to “limit adult content” in Safari. But, if you forget to toggle off the iTunes App Store, there are 50+ other browsers to download in order to bypass Safari.
Perform a factory reset. iPhones with restrictions enabled can be reset by connecting the phone to a computer and using iTunes. It’s not a popular thing to do, since it restores the phone to its factory settings, but for a kid trying to skirt the controls, it’s a viable option.
Search through Google’s “related images.” Even with restrictions enabled on an iPhone, if you access a Google search bar through a hidden location (see #6 above), you can access inappropriate images through Google’s “related images” under an image that is clicked on. These “related images” don’t always obey the “safe search” rules as the original Google search.
For an ongoing solution to these issues, go to the rest of this article by Chris McKenna at Protect Young Minds: protectyoungminds.org/2017/01/19/10-ways-kids-beat-internet-filters/
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