What is Safe Search?
Safe Search is a feature offered by major search engines that keeps adult content out of the search results. Firewalla integrates this capability into its toolset. For those devices that are monitored by Firewalla, if anyone enters an inappropriate or suggestive phrase in the search bar, offensive content will be filtered out from search results.
Firewalla supports the following platform's safe search capability:
- Google Search
- Youtube
- Bing
- DuckDuckGo
Firewalla is NOT responsible for content filtering. What to be filtered is determined by the end system you are accessing. Firewalla only directs search traffic to the "safe search" engines from the specific providers, and the providers (google, youtube, bing, duckduckgo) will filter the search results.
What does Safe Search do?
Different search engine's SafeSearch capability behaves differently.
- Google's SafeSearch uses its artificial intelligence algorithms to filter out pornography and potentially offensive content.
- Youtube looks at signals like the video’s metadata, title, and the language used in the video; some videos may not be available as a result of human reviewers applying an age-restriction to a video.
- DuckDuckGo uses many signals, such as video title, description, metadata, Community Guidelines reviews, and age-restrictions, to identify and filter out potentially offensive content.
- Bing's SafeSearch uses its advanced technology to filter adult content. The "Strict" filter is turned on and integrated.
How to enable Safe Search?
- You can enable/disable Safe Search globally for all devices from the main page, and select which platform's Safe Search to use.
- Or you can enable/disable Safe Search per device by tapping the "Safe Search" button at the device page.
Comments
4 comments
Hello, Thanks for the detailed explanation. I've a question about Family --> Safe Search. I'm having Firewalla Gold, Enabled Family protect with Safe Search against platforms Youtube, Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo. What i see is, on Mobile and iPads I see that this is forcing safe/restricted search on Bing and Youtube comments are automatically taken out with a banner `Restricted mode has hidden comments for this Video` which is awesome. But on my MacBookPro i could still see Youtube Comments and can set Bing search engine --> Safe search to Off {This is not possible on iPhone, iPad}. Could you please let me know what specific setting to be enabled for this feature to be seamless across? I am planning to buy a MacBookPro for my kid (10 Yr Old) and planning to use this feature with VPN for in/out side of home network.
-Thanks. Sriram
Try a different browser on your MAC and see if it will make a difference, some browsers may use DoH (DNS over HTTPS) which may bypass controls. Next, also check if your MacBook Pro has mac randomization on, if it is, then make sure you place the right device safe search
This was a mistake from my end. my Office VPN was turned on and that has caused this issue. I forgot about VPN being on and tested this feature earlier. Thanks for checking. A follow up question:
Could you plz recommend a VPN service which can be injected as profile and not as an App on Phone/Laptop for kids not being able to remove or turn off when they are away.
Within the last week I noticed YouTube videos were being restricted. It appears that restricted mode was enabled, which I did not do within my Google account. It said the setting was set by my administrator, but as the administrator I was not able to disable it. I know that I set Safe Search on my firewalla purple, many months ago when I first purchased and setup the unit, yet this problem just started in the last week. I disabled YouTube in my Safe Search after reading through this article and things started working again. Was this not working before and it was fixed in a recent firewalla update?
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