iPhone browsing via McAfee

We here at Safernets have taken a giant step into the void.

My eldest has an iPhone.

This is a challenge on many, many levels. The first being location. The number one rule in keeping your internet safe is to have a public location where the computers are located. The lack of privacy can in itself help to police the content coming into your home. However, the ability to have the entire internet in your pocket changes this dynamic completely. Rules must be set. My wife and I are still working on these rules.

The second, more technical challenge, is how to regulate the parental controls on the iPhone (or iPod Touch).

iOS has some rudimentary controls built in. Basically, you can turn off some things about the device.



This allows the parent to make sure YouTube and Safari are not used. Once "Install Apps" is turned off, the device becomes very locked down. However, it also becomes much less useful.

The reason my children want an iOS device is to use the internet and apps. Enter the world of secondary browsers. A number of developers have stepped up to fill this void - creating a replacement for Safari that will allow some measure of parental controls. Some are whitelists, some are blacklists.


Recently, McAfee released their version of an iPhone internet browser called McAfee Family Protection [iTunes link]. At $19.99 one would expect this to be a suitable and usable option.

The good part, is that a complete history of the device's web browsing history is kept online for parents to look at. A nice bonus is that the location of the phone is stored with each page access. This is a bit of an overkill, and may cause some unnecessary battery drain. But it is nice. Google searches are also defaulted to Google's safe search.

As for the software itself, it is close to unusable. There is no back button. Web browsing with no back button. This is such a crippling limitation that it is hard to move past it.

There are several other major bugs. Most of the time, when I googled for information - part of the google results would stay in front of the screen. I had to restart the app to clear it.

I have been hoping some of these things would be cleared up in a future release, but it has been months. If any of my readers want to suggest another solution, I'm all ears.