Can firewalla control a phone that is connected to mobile network ?
I understand when a phone is connectd to wifi its controlled by firewalla, however what if the phone is connected to mobile internet ?
I am asking because my children can simply switch to mobile internet and have complete access to the www ? does firewalla offer some form of vpn or control that can prevent this from happening ?
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No, Firewalla can't directly control that, but other firewalls can't control it either.
Things like that have to be controlled on the phone itself.
There might be software you can install on your children's phones that would let you lock things down so they can't bypass the WiFi connection at home, or that do filtering in the software that would do what you want.
NextDNS has some client software that might be useful for you. You'd probably want to pay for a subscription to NextDNS, which isn't very expensive, but most of us already have too many subscriptions already these days.
The NextDNS client would allow you to force the phone to use NextDNS filtering DNS. On the iPhone the client software lets you set a passcode so its settings can't be changed. You could configure it so that, no matter if the phone was using your home WiFi or the cell network, it would use NextDNS and thus you could block your children from accessing some things.
It's probably not perfect, and may or may not work as well for you as the controls built into Firewalla. It would work with Firewalla when they're connected to your home WiFi and instead of Firewalla when they're connected to the cell network or using WiFi outside your house somewhere.
I myself have a Firewalla and use NextDNS as well, with the NextDNS client software installed on our iPhones. It works well for my spouse and I. We're interested in blocking tracking and malware, and improving our privacy. We don't do any blocking for children using mobile devices anymore, so I can't speak directly to that.
NextDNS is free to try, so it would probably be worth at least looking at.
My spouse and I are very happy with our Firewalla, and consider it to be an essential part of our Internet usage. It's our "little Purple friend." :-)
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Please correct me if i am wrong, i just received my firewall gold plus, and the aim is for kids to not be on various devices for a long time when they are home, but i have an anticipation that they simply bypass that by enable mobile internet on their phone.
so i figured out that apple offer a vpn parental control:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254444941
andd my firewalla gold plus offer vpn.
so this means i can force all connection from mobile internet through my vpn which in return is controlled by my firewalla.please let me know if this is possible ?
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Yes, if Apple allows you to setup a VPN tunnel back to your Firewalla on your children's phones and lock that down so they can't disable it, I think that should work. All traffic to/from their phones would be forced to go through the VPN tunnel and thus through your Firewalla with its protection settings.
Good catch on that Apple discussion thread!
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