What is arriving right now
Not hypothetical categories. These are the four things a DNS filter is genuinely good at stopping, and they arrive on every device you own.
Phishing
Fake login pages aimed at your bank, your email, your child's game account.
Malware
Domains that serve the payload once something on the network reaches for them.
Trackers
Profiles built from every device in the house, including the ones you cannot install software on.
Adult sites
Blocked by category, with Safe Search forced on the major engines.
What it actually does
Built on AdGuard Home, the open-source network filter. These are its documented capabilities, not a wishlist.
Threats stopped at the door
Every request from every device is checked against a database of known phishing and malware domains before it resolves. Nothing to install on the phone.
Homework hours are a schedule, not an argument
Block named services on a per-day timetable. Weeknights from six can look nothing like Saturday morning, and you set it once.
One house, different ages
Per-device rules. The fifteen-year-old and the seven-year-old do not get the same internet, and neither has to know how it is enforced.
You can finally see what is happening
A query log shows what each device asked for and what was refused. Most parents have never once seen this.
Your household's DNS stops being public reading
Requests leave encrypted over DoH, DoT or DNSCrypt, so whoever sits between your house and the internet cannot read or tamper with them.
Covers what you cannot install anything on
Smart TVs, consoles, speakers, tablets. If it joins the network, it is filtered.
Why parents are looking in the first place
Every figure below links to the primary source. We have not rounded anything in our favour.
Something changed for teenagers, and it is measurable
Around the start of the twenty-tens, American teenagers began reporting sadness and hopelessness at rates their own parents had not reported at the same age. That measurement is not the disputed part. The federal survey behind it has asked the same question, in the same way, for decades.
- 42% In 2021, 42% of US high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. 2021 Youth Risk Behavior Survey Results — US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- 57% Among teenage girls the figure was 57%, which the CDC described as the highest level reported in the past decade. US Teen Girls Experiencing Increased Sadness and Violence — US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
How a teenager's day is spent now
Whatever else is true, the arithmetic of a childhood has changed. A device that fits in a pocket now sits between a young person and their friendships, their homework, their boredom and their sleep. Time spent there is time not spent somewhere else.
- 95% 95% of US teenagers say they have, or have access to, a smartphone at home. Teens, Social Media and Technology 2024 — Pew Research Center
- Nearly half of US teenagers say they are online almost constantly. Teens, Social Media and Technology 2024 — Pew Research Center
The argument you have probably heard
One book put those two trends side by side and gave the connection a name. It is the reason a great many parents are thinking about this at all, and it is the reason you may have arrived here.
- Jonathan Haidt argues that a great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness among young people. Disputed. This is the book's central argument, not a settled finding, and it is contested by researchers who study exactly this question. The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness? — Nature
And the strongest case against it
We are trying to sell you something, so you should be sceptical of us. Here is the best argument against the one we just made, in the words of the researchers who make it. We would rather you heard it from us than found it later and wondered what else we left out.
Two trend lines that rise together are not proof that one explains the other. That is the whole of the disagreement, and it is not settled.
- Reviewing that book in Nature, the developmental psychologist Candice Odgers wrote that the suggestion digital technologies are rewiring children's brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science. The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness? — Nature
- 0.4% A study of more than 300,000 adolescents found that technology use accounts for at most 0.4% of the variation in their well-being. The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use — Nature Human Behaviour
Where that leaves a parent
Both camps agree on more than the argument suggests. Young people spend a great deal of time on platforms built to hold their attention, and parents have almost no say over what those platforms send into the house.
You do not have to settle a scientific dispute to want that say. What we sell is not a treatment and not a cure. It is a setting on your home network that decides what gets in.
- The same review argues that considerable reforms to these platforms are required, given how much time young people spend on them. The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness? — Nature
What we will not pretend
Most tools in this space list what they catch. The table below also lists what they miss. A parent who learns the gap from their teenager, rather than from us, has been sold something.
What this covers, and what it does not
The list nobody else publishes. Read the second half before you decide anything.
| Blocked | Every device on your home network, with nothing installed on your child's phone |
| Blocked | Blocking whole sites and services by domain |
| Blocked | Advertising and tracking domains, across the home network |
| Blocked | Known phishing and malware domains, checked against a threat database as each request is made |
| Blocked | Adult sites, and Safe Search forced on the major search engines |
| Blocked | Named services such as social video and gaming, on a per-day schedule you set, so homework hours can differ from Saturday |
| Blocked | Different rules for different devices, so a fifteen-year-old and a seven-year-old are not treated the same |
| Blocked | Your household's DNS requests encrypted on the way out, so the network operator between you and the internet cannot read or tamper with them |
| Blocked | A log of what each device asked for, so you can see what is actually happening on your network |
| Still gets through | Your child's phone on mobile data, away from the home network |
| Still gets through | Your child's phone on a friend's home network or on school Wi-Fi |
| Still gets through | Blocking one part of a service while allowing the rest, such as short video inside a site you want to keep |
| Still gets through | Ads and sponsored posts served from the same domain as the content, which is why YouTube and in-feed social ads still get through |
| Still gets through | Scanning files, removing malware already on a device, or stopping an attack that never makes a DNS request. This is not antivirus |
| Still gets through | Apps or browsers that use their own encrypted resolver instead of the one your home network hands out |
A filter on your home network protects your home network. It is not antivirus, and it stops at your front door — the phone that leaves the house is a problem we have not solved.