Using NextDNS for content restricting

Parents today face an enormous task of educating and managing a child’s exposure to digital content. I believe that educating and having conversations with a child will be more impactful than any piece of software. In days past, parents may have been most worried about exposure to items such as pornography. Today, exposure to misinformation, false advertising, and hate speech are extremely worrisome. I wanted to outline a tool that I recently started to use to help limit exposure to my child.

NextDNS describes itself as follows: protects you from all kinds of security threats, blocks ads and trackers on websites and in apps and provides a safe and supervised Internet for kids — on all devices and on all networks. I have found it incredible useful to configure restrictions on a per-device basis. It also has many preconfigured options that allow quick configuration. My favorite part is the client based configuration on devices such as iOS. The client allows the device to be configured to a specific profile and password protected if required. As the configuration is DNS based, it doesn’t matter what network the device is connected to as restrictions will still be applied. I had been previously using pihole to restrict ads and content on child devices. If the device left our network, all restrictions were lifted unless a VPN technology was utilized.

Overall, NextDNS is a tool in a toolbox to limit bad content exposure and assist enforcing application time rules. As mentioned earlier, this is not a replacement for education and conversations with your kids. NextDNS has a free tier option that will allow you to try it out with a 300,000 query limit per month. I have upgraded to the Pro tier which allows unlimited queries for about $20 a year. Outlined below is an example utilizing NextDNS to limit application usage on an iOS device. Feel free to contact me blog@412linux.io with questions or to continue the discussion offline. Additionally, I believe I have an affiliate link that can use for 30% a year of service. Cheers!

Example for iPhone:

Let’s say you have an old iPhone that you want to allow your child to use as a music player only. In this case, Spotify would be allowed, but other apps and services would be limited. We’ll take a high level look at the steps to set up this solution.

Setup the device profile on NextDNS. In the dropdown next to the NextDNS logo, select New and name it appropriately. This will provide you with the End point information for client configuration.

Setup the Parental Controls On the Parental Control tab, select the Websites, Apps & Games button. A list of apps will appear. Add any of the items on the list you wish to restrict.

There are also a number of different methods of controls on the Parental Control tab. A favorite of mine is Recreation time. Recreation time allows a parent the option to configure a time period where some applications are allowed. In the example below, Roblox is allowed during the set Recreation Time, but TikTok is not.

Circling back to the iPhone example, I would add every app available except Spotify This would allow Spotify, but none of the other apps listed. As expected, any app not listed will be allowed. I would also configure categories that should be prohibited such as pornography and gambling.