Lay the groundwork
As a parent or guardian, you know what feels right for your family and how your kids learn best. To help your family navigate through new technologies, gadgets, and services in an ever-changing online world, it helps to get practical advice. That’s why we continuously talk to safety experts, parents, educators and communities around the world – to keep a pulse on what works. Together, we can help nurture a community of responsible digital citizens.
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Family safety basics
For busy parents, get some quick suggestions for how to help keep your family safe online.
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Keep your data secure
Find a few simple online security tips to help you and your family stay safe online.
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Stay safe on the go
Learn about how to talk to your family about mobile devices.
Safety tools
Discover the Top 5 Google safety features designed to help you keep your family safe online.
Get family-friendly results from Search
By enabling SafeSearch, you can filter out most of the mature content that you or your family may prefer to avoid. If an inappropriate result does sneak through, you can report it to Google. We're always working to improve our content filters, and this kind of feedback can help us make SafeSearch better for everyone.
Visit the Search Settings page at www.google.com/preferences.
Check the box next to “Filter explicit results”.
Hit the “save” button at the bottom of the page.
You can click “Lock SafeSearch” to help prevent others from changing your setting. You will be asked to enter your password.
Set a filter to keep inappropriate content out
If you’d prefer to not to see mature or age-restricted content as you browse YouTube, scroll to the bottom of any YouTube page and enable Safety Mode. Safety Mode helps filter out potentially objectionable content from search, related videos, playlists, shows, and films.
Scroll to the bottom of any YouTube page and click the drop-down menu in the “Safety” section.
Select the On or Off option to enable or disable Safety Mode.
To lock this setting, sign in to your Google Account.
Once you're signed in, you will have the option to lock this setting.
Supervise users on shared Chromebooks
You can't always be there to supervise your family's Web activity. For the times you're not in the room with them, there's Supervised User for Google Chrome. When this feature is enabled, you can review a history of pages the user have visited, allow or block certain sites, and manage which websites that your family member can view.
To set up a supervised user on your Chromebook, start on the main sign-in screen and click Add user.
On the right hand side of the screen, select Create a supervised user.
Click Create a supervised user.
Log in to the account that will manage the supervised user and click Next.
Select a username, password, and picture for the supervised user. Click Next.
Limit access to just approved apps and games
Want to share your tablet without sharing all your stuff? On Android tablets running 4.3 and higher, you can create restricted profiles that limit the access that other users have to features and content on your tablet.
If you’re the tablet owner, touch Settings → Users → Add user or profile.
Touch Restricted profile then New profile to name the profile.
Use the ON/OFF toggles and Settings to grant access to features, settings and apps.
Press the Power button to return to the lock screen, then touch the new profile icon.
Once it's all set up, the Home screen is empty. Touch the All Apps icon to get started with the new profile.
Use app ratings to choose age-appropriate apps
Just like at the movies, you can decide which Google Play apps are appropriate for your family by looking at the ratings: everyone, low maturity, medium maturity, or high maturity. You can filter apps by level, and also lock the filtering level with a simple PIN code (keeping other users from accidentally disabling the filter).
Open the Google Play Store app from your device.
Touch Menu Menu → Settings (depending on your device, your Menu icon may look different).
Under “User controls”, select Content filtering.
Choose the filter that's right for your family. Ratings range from “Everyone” to “High Maturity”.
Touch OK. Then, create and enter a PIN to help prevent unwanted changes to your filter settings.