Blocking / Whitelisting URLs via Parental Controls / ScreenTime

jamf-42
Valued Contributor II

Need to whitelist / blacklist some URLs.. for all browsers.. toying with Parental Controls.. which now invokes ScreenTime... while it kinda works.. the user is presented with this dialog... and they can 'add' the site.. and even get a dialog that its now allowed.. but.. its not.. all rather clunky.. 

Any way to disable this dialog? 

Any other suggestions for blocking / whitelisting..  trying to not add another product / cost / overhead

 

Capture 2024-11-12 at 13.21.00@2x.png

jamf42_0-1731419769633.png

 

2 REPLIES 2

Shyamsundar
Contributor

if your users don't have admin rights, you can add the host entries(/etc/hosts) which will block the URL 

##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting.  Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1       localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1             localhost
127.0.0.1       https://google.com
127.0.0.1.      https://m.google.com

 

jamiesmithJAX
New Contributor III

I was forced to use this a while back as the AV product we were using did not provide any URL filtering capabilities and honestly it was a nightmare.  It was constantly flagging sites incorrectly.  For example, I work for a research lab where they often search things like "breast" cancer.  The presence of the word "breast" would always trigger a false alarm and I would then have to whitelist it.