HomeShield Parental Controls are Blocking Necessary Services/CDNs

HomeShield Parental Controls are Blocking Necessary Services/CDNs

HomeShield Parental Controls are Blocking Necessary Services/CDNs
HomeShield Parental Controls are Blocking Necessary Services/CDNs
2024-05-11 17:32:19
Model: Deco XE75 Pro  
Hardware Version:
Firmware Version: 1.2.9 Build 20231225 Rel. 57498

Hello, I've added HomeShield+ Parental Controls to my Deco system and I'm running into tons of issues. I'm frustrated I'm paying for this since it doesn't offer much customization.

 

After enabling parental controls, my kids are having trouble using the Internet. Even with most restrictions disabled (which negates the point of parental controls), it's almost unusable.

 

Here are the issues I'm seeing:

 

  • YouTube does not work at all when You Tube Restricted is enabled. According to the notes, it's only supposed to block mature content, not the entire service.
  • Many Web Filter apps and services are misclassified. For example, Online Communication and Pay to Surf seem to break many basic things.
  • The service automatically blocks sites, but only allows you to approve 32. Further more, you can't add them manually or edit them, meaning you can't whitelist entire domains.
  • Many of the sites being blocked are necessary for basic functionality, such as Apple's CDNs and other services. Because Google's and Apple's CDNs are being blocked, many features are temperamental or broken entirely; this includes basic functionality such as push notifications, app downloads (I don't have downloads blocked), media content, and more.

 

Without a way to whitelist pages, it makes things almost unusable. My son loves watching YouTube, but unless I unblock every CDN that YouTube uses and turn off all YouTube restrictions, he's unable to watch it. Apple, like others, uses over 900 domains, many of which are being blocked and essential to functionality—I can only unblock up to 32 because of the limitations on the router. In theory, none of these should be blocked at all unless specific to a restriction (and ONLY specific to that restriction).

 

I'm struggling to understand how these controls are helpful and why users have to pay for a half-baked solution. HomeShield should be beta at best. There is also a huge lack of configuration options in the router itself and the Web portal is extremely limited on desktop. These limitations make it even harder to find a solution/workaround to the shoddy parental controls.

 

I really like the ease-of-use of the Deco system and overall it has decent performance. I get consistently fast speeds throughout my home (700–900Mbps)—even when connected to mesh points—and the network is very stable with minimal jitter. But there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of configuration.

 

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#1
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6 Reply
Re:HomeShield Parental Controls are Blocking Necessary Services/CDNs
2024-05-13 02:21:10

  @AdminWes 

Hi, Thank you very much for the feedback.

I'd like to follow up on your case via email and consult the senior engineers for further advice.

Please check whether you could receive my email later.

Best regards.

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#2
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Re:HomeShield Parental Controls are Blocking Necessary Services/CDNs
2024-06-08 13:36:52

  @David-TP I am having the same issues with the homeshield controls blocking all YouTube access and even Apples App Store. It's not a very useful feature and worth the cost is nothing on my child's phone works. 

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#3
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Re:HomeShield Parental Controls are Blocking Necessary Services/CDNs
2024-06-24 02:25:15

Was this issue resolved and how?  I have the same issue.  Limiting the restriction to 32 makes it impossible to add the sites that are needed to either be blocked or allowed.  It is also blocking valid and normally allowed general sites. Should allow the use of wildcards (*,  or ?, or +,) to allow to block keyword in the a domain for all the variations of sister sites. 

 

Appreciate a response on how to resolve.  

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#4
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Re:HomeShield Parental Controls are Blocking Necessary Services/CDNs
2024-06-24 20:11:15

  @fons100 I'm not sure. I resolved it by going with a different router 🙃

 

TP-Link is a good consumer product and hopefully they will give their users more control over this in the future.

 

For now, you can do what I did and allow specific content delivery networks (CDNs), but in keep in mind that companies like Apple and Google may change which CDNs they use at any time. This is a workaround, not a fix.

 

Note: A CDN is a group of servers that deliver content. They are distributed over a large area (usually global) in order to provide quick access to content on the web.
 

HomeShield seems to be blocking CDNs and URLs specific to certain services. For example, ytimg.com is used for YouTube content, but HomeShield blocks it when adult restrictions are enabled. I'm not sure how TP-Link planned on delivering only safe content, it's not like you can content filter all of YouTube through a URL, but they claim to use AI, so maybe that was the plan.

 

Since your limited to allowing 32 domains (and can't specify which ones), you'll need to look at what's being blocked the most and research what it is. I'd provide a list of URLs I'd recommend allowing, but this forum won't let me post all the links. A quick web search can help you find out what most domains do and who they're owned by. Then allow the ones (at your own risk) that you think are necessary to fix your issue. This is a temporary solution and has severe limitiations.

 

That said, parental controls aren't very useful when it comes to the web. Many services are end-to-end encrypted, browsers have built-in privacy measures of their own (proxies, iCloud Private Relay), VPNs are available, devices spoof their MACs (Private Addresses on Apple devices), and kids will always find a way. If you're looking to keep kids from accidentally coming across content you don't want them to see, then this would be a great solution (if it worked), but if you want to deter or restrict access, you'll want to do that at the device-level.

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#5
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Re:HomeShield Parental Controls are Blocking Necessary Services/CDNs
2024-08-10 03:03:14

  @AdminWes 

 

Thank you so much for the detailed post. I'm having the same experience and am looking to return the devices. This should be basic stuff. 

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#6
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Re:HomeShield Parental Controls are Blocking Necessary Services/CDNs
Saturday

 OMG. Why on earth are the parental controls blocking known CDNs! Dang. I really wish I'd researched this more deeply before buying! 

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#7
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