Hello and welcome back to our live sessions here at Griffin Technical Support. I am Sarah. I am the head of technical support for Griffin Online Safety. And I also have a social media presence where I help families understand and manage technology in their home.
I'm at Family Tech on all social media platforms. So if you have... any questions at all, go ahead and pop those in the chats, whether they're questions about your Griffin or questions about your dog or questions about just technology in general, as it relates to your family.
Go ahead and let us know what those are. And I will be happy to answer those questions for you. As the head of technical support, I do want to explain how you can reach our technical support agents. you can always open up a chat at griffinconnect.com.
Our texts are available from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern time, and that is seven days a week. So make sure you let us know.
We also have a telephone number. It is 480-428-4016. If you don't want to try and write that down or remember it, We actually always have it available.
I will pop up our screen right here. And if you go to the settings in the Griffin app and scroll all the way down here to contact support, you can open up a call or a chat just by pushing either of these buttons. Or you can send us an email or like enter just a ticket by tapping any of these other options if you want to get a little more detailed as to what the issue that you are experiencing actually is. So that is how you contact our support department.
We are here, like I said, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern Time, seven days a week. Our telephone lines can get a little busy. So if you leave a message, don't worry.
We will get back to you in the order that it was received. So make sure you do leave a message and then we can get back to you. All right.
So let's dig right into. our topic for the day. And today we're talking about setting up parental controls.
And this is kind of one of the main things that everybody or that people want to use the Gryphon for. So it's important to understand basically everything that the Gryphon can do with regards to these user profiles. So we have A few user profiles. I meant to delete some of these test Sarah's because I every time I do this, I have to create a new test user so I can show you how to create the users.
But assuming you've got everything set up and you're just basically at this family and guest profile, you don't have any other profiles around. Go ahead and tap this users button down at the bottom left hand side of the screen. And then at the top right-hand side of the screen is a little guy with a plus.
So you go ahead and add that. You can add a picture. You can type in a username. We'll go again with just test Sarah five or whatever. And then you can set an age group.
So let's go over a little bit about what these different age group profiles. do and mean. So this toddler age group profile just means, so this is really just setting the content filter and basically the defaults for what is going to be blocked and what is going to be allowed by default. So if we've got this toddler profile, this is a safe list only profile.
So they're not going to be able to get to any other. um, websites, except for those that you manually allow in their user profile. And we'll go over how to do that. Um, but so this is going to be the most restricted profile. It's only going to allow access to, um, the sites that you have deemed as safe.
So the next level up is going to be elementary school. Um, and so with this elementary profile, they don't have to be in elementary school to be, and they don't have to be a toddler to be on the toddler profile. If you are having issues.
and you want them to only be able to access websites that you manually allow, you can do that. reduce that. Okay.
So the elementary profile can access just safe list sites, the ones that you have manually allowed and educational sites. So there's a lot of other categories that will be blocked by default when you have this elementary profile, because it is only going to allow access to educational sites. The next level we've got is middle school. So middle school is going to open up like maybe some streaming platforms.
maybe some games and things like that. Whereas the elementary school just gives you educational content. The middle school profile is going to allow you access to some of those other things like games and, you know, things that are not social media, basically. So it's going to block out social media still, but it will open up a little bit more than elementary profile. Then we've got high school.
Now the high school profile does open up social media platforms. And again, you can manually override any of these. This is just kind of what it's going to set as default.
This 18 and over, like it says right here, just has no access to sites that are deemed pornography. And it can get to every other website. And then unfiltered, there is going to be no restrictions at all.
It has unrestricted access to the internet. So the next setting here, a lot of people get confused about, and it is this safe search setting. So first of all, if you enable the safe search, it is going to block access to all other search engine websites.
So some people will have this enabled and then they'll submit a ticket that they cannot get to their Yahoo mail or AOL mail. And that's because Yahoo and AOL are blocked. when you have this safe search enabled because we are not able to force the safe search on any of those other search engines.
So it will block access to all of those other websites and only allow access to Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo. And what it's going to do on those is enable their safe search to be forced on. Now, a lot of people will also say, hey, I've got safe search on, but they still are on.
They're still able to get to inappropriate content. And at that point, we can confirm that safe search is turned on on that search engine. But at that point, it's up to the search engine what it's going to deem as appropriate or inappropriate. So we can only enable the setting. We can't tell Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo what is appropriate and inappropriate.
So. You know, you might find that with SafeSearch turned on, there are things that you still wouldn't allow in your home. And that you have to pick that up with Google because at that point, it's really up to Google to go what it deems is appropriate and appropriate.
So the similar thing goes with SafeYouTube. Now, SafeYouTube also restricts the device. So if we've got SafeYouTube turned on.
the device that is associated with this user profile will have restricted mode enabled. Now, restricted mode can lock them out of a lot of videos that they want to see, but it also will disable the chat and the comments for all of the videos that they view. So they won't be able to see any comments or leave any comments on any videos with restricted mode turned on. So. That is just something to be aware of.
And again, it's just going to enable YouTube restricted mode. At that point, it's up to YouTube what it determines is safe to be viewed while on restricted mode. So we have no control over it at that point. Ad blocker is another one that can trip people up sometimes.
With ad blocker turned on, there are some things that might be blocked. And then there's some things that might not be blocked because they don't follow normal like ad settings. So say I have a website and I need to write a post on my page has like an ad in the image.
That's not really labels ad. It's not coming from networks or anything like that. So um So this ad blocker would not notice that that is an ad and would not block it.
So that's something to be aware of with this ad blocker turned on. Store browsing history, you probably definitely want to toggle that on for most of your users. And we'll get into what it shows as the browsing history in just a minute.
And then this is a new feature. I will go over this on the fourth Thursday of the month. But this is this new YouTube history feature.
It is currently in beta. We do have some beta testers right now that have this enabled. including myself. But you can check out that in the fourth Thursday.
I will give a more detailed description of how that works. And then this include homework time and screen time. So say you give an hour of screen time allotted to your child and they use that entire hour doing their homework or they're just on websites that have that are, you know, you're there in homework time. in this user profile.
And I'll get into exactly what that means. But if they're in homework time, if you have this setting turned on, that is going to click down the time frame that they are allowed in screen time when they're in that homework time. And then allow VPN for most kids.
You probably want to get this toggled off because it is, um, oh, sorry, we're on unfiltered. So it's not letting me do that. Um, toggle this, allow VPN. off because if they install a VPN, that is one of the most common ways for kids to try and bypass the Gryphon parental controls.
So that's what we've got there. We'll go ahead and not save that user just because we already have several test users. So we'll just go ahead and use these guys. So you can see with this user, I can at any time press this pause button. It's going to suspend their internet.
I can suspend it in five minutes and 15 minutes or just right now. And it's going to suspend them. So one of my favorite things to do on holidays and during the summer is when I wake up in the morning, because I wake up fairly early, I will just pause my kids device like my kids profiles until they wake up. They notice that they have no internet.
They get their chores done. And then once they got their chores done. They'll come and tell me and then I will unpause their profile.
I wish there was a way to just like have it paused automatically every morning and then you have to manually allow them access. But we haven't added that feature quite yet. But that's what I like to do. I will pause their profile in the morning and then after they've finished their chores, finished their homework, whatever, then I will unpause their profile.
So. So then any devices that are assigned to that user profile will be right here on this devices tab. So I can come in here. I can change the device type if I need to. I can change who's the test user.
This YouTube history tracking, homebound. Homebound is something that you can install on your child's device that will force the device back. to the protected Griffin network.
And then you can delete the device and all of the above. I can also just pause this particular device. So say I want to pause just my kids, you know, PlayStation until they get their homework done.
And then I can open up the PlayStation. So I can pause individual devices the same way I can just pause the user profile as well. So now let's talk about screen time because this is where a lot of users can get tripped up. So today's screen time, it's going to show exactly how much time is allowed for today. I can add reward time.
So let's say first, let's talk about screen time. So this one, every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, the allowed time is one hour. If I want to add Saturday to that profile, I can just click that and then that is going to have it.
all the days of the week. Or if I want to change it again, I can say, um, I only want this for, uh, Tuesday, Wednesday. Um, and then if you look on Friday, there is no, um, No schedule. So we'll go into Friday and I can. say they can have two hours on Friday.
So now if you look on Friday, there's the two hours. Thursday is the one hour. And you can look at all of the different days of the week that way.
And then you can change individual days of the week here, or you can edit the schedule that's already there. from this. So let's say they've used up their whole hour and you want to reward them because they've finished their homework.
Everything's good. So we're going to go ahead and add reward time. So if I add 30 minutes of reward time, it's going to increase by 30 minutes. But here's where some people will get tripped up. If I want to add another 30 minutes, What I have to do is tap on this reward time and change this to one hour.
And it's 30 minutes. And I'm going to give them 30 minutes more. So you can see here now the remaining time is almost two hours because of the reward time is up to one hour.
So if I want to give them 30 more minutes, again, I come in here. I change this to an hour and 30 minutes. And then I hit the check mark. And now you can see it's two hours and 30 minutes.
So that's where people get tripped up. They think if I go into a reward time and then just like, okay, I'll just give them another 30 minutes there. That's not what that does. You need to increase this reward time to the accumulative of it.
So that's how you handle screen time. Now, another thing that gets people tripped up with screen time is that screen time is calculated by actual traffic going back and forth. So if I'm watching a YouTube video and the YouTube video is two hours, three hours long, and it has buffered the entire video in like 30 minutes and my screen time, like, so I will only use 30 minutes of that screen time.
even though I'm watching the video for three hours. So that's something to be aware of, especially with any streaming services like Netflix. If they start the show and then it buffers, it doesn't matter how long you're actually watching the show because the traffic isn't going back and forth anymore.
The whole video has loaded and there's no more traffic. So that is something to be aware of with the... screen time. I'll say internet sky.
And so this is what is the internet for that device. So if I look at this homework time, or if I want to add, um, if I want to add anything, I can just click this plus button. I can add homework time, bedtime, or suspend time.
So suspend time is going to be very similar to bedtime. It's just going to like basically lock everything out and I can choose which days of the week I want to have that suspend time. And then it's going to set that suspend time.
So and then we have bedtime and you can see what days of the week have this bedtime. You can change the bedtime if you want or you can delete it or whatever days of the week. So we are also going to show you here. No.
So suspend time and then homework time. You can we'll we'll see that in a minute. And then this screen time limits.
Again, this part is part of our premium subscription. I go into more details on that in the fourth Thursday of the month. So we'll check out web browsing next.
So this is another place where I really like to show people what's going on here. So this Apple, this iCloud, things like that, it doesn't necessarily mean I have this device open and I'm browsing that particular URL. A lot of applications will check in with servers and things like that in the background.
Since the Griffin is only a Wi-Fi device, it can only see traffic. It doesn't see exactly what is happening on your device. So it knows that the device has hit Apple.com.
But most of the reason it's hit Apple.com is maybe to check for updates or something like that. So it is not necessarily what they are browsing, but it is... the URLs that the device is hitting. So if you come across a URL, like so say they need this website for a school project they're working on and it is blocked.
One thing you can do, like they can't get access to it and you don't know why. So one thing you can do is come in here and just view what is blocked. And actually, let's just go over to my son's profile because I know he hits blocked sites all the time. So if we come here, we can see what is blocked.
And then what we can do is we can tap into here, figure out what is blocked, and I can either allow it for. homework or block it for homework or have it unrestricted. So that is what's going to be in effect for that user profile.
So if there's something that keeps getting blocked or something like that, then come in here and look and see if it's unrestricted or restricted and go ahead and allow that website from here. And then you can see the web history for multiple days of the week just by coming back. and hitting those.
Again, like I talked about is YouTube history. I'll get into more details on that on the fourth Thursday of the month. So now this access control, like I said, with the age group profile, it's going to set all of this access control to defaults, but you can override any of those defaults through this section. So I'm going to go by most. So the age group profile is what's going to be like most restrictive, right?
So then I can come in here to manage by category and I can allow or block any of these particular categories. So setting the age group profile sets what is blocked and unrestricted by default. But if I come in here and I, um, we want to keep that blocked, but, um, Come in here and say arts and entertainment unrestricted. That's going to anything that's categorized as that will now be unrestricted. One day I want to allow or I want to keep chat and messaging blocked, but I want to just allow access to one specific chat program.
I can come in here and enter the URL. So like, let's just. Say Griffin connect dot com. And then it's going to tell me if it's unrestricted and what category it is in.
I can change the category here to one that is unrestricted or I can just unrestrict the URL from here. Or I can always block it or just block it during homework or allow only during homework. So that is the manage by URL.
So. Anything that is in managed URL is going to override anything that is managed by category and override anything that is managed by age group profile. And then you can also come in here and look at all these.
These are just the most popular apps that we wanted to, because a lot of apps don't necessarily, like say if I want to allow Animal Jam. Just allowing AnimalJam.com in the Manage by URL generally won't allow the site. There are many, many URLs that are associated with each of these apps.
So using this Manage Apps instead of Manage by URL is going to be much more beneficial because of all of those URLs that you might not know are actually part of that website or that application. So that is how you can manage by apps. Then we can come in here and look at insights.
This is just going to give you like an insight into what they're doing instead of looking. This data comes directly from the web browsing history. So you can see how they're spending their time. You can see in a graph form or you can see in a list form.
And then also how much data they're using on your network. at any given time. And then we are back to all of these settings.
So the last thing I really want to touch on really quick is if you are at this home screen. So we talked about those schedules and everything that we've set, but if you want to override that schedule just for today, so say I have a schedule and it's a holiday. And so I want to turn the bedtime off or I want to make the bedtime later.
I can come in here. And I'm going to change this to, we'll say 1145. And that is going to update the internet schedule just for today. It's not going to make any permanent changes to that schedule.
So you can see bedtime is 1145 today, but tomorrow it's going to go back to what it is or the normal schedule that it has. This is just overriding it for the day. And then again. you can toggle off any of these scheduled timeframes. So say they're in homework time and they finished all their homework and you want to allow them access to the internet.
Well, you can come in here and turn off homework time and that's going to turn homework time back on for tomorrow and it's just going to turn it off for today. So that's the last thing I wanted to mention really quick in this user dashboard. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of an idea of how to set up these user profiles. You can always go back to that screen just by hitting manage user here from the dashboard, or you can suspend the internet to that user just from this user dashboard as well. So if you have any questions at all, feel free to pop those in the chat.
Otherwise, we'll probably end just a couple minutes early. Thank you guys so much for being here. Like I said, I am, sorry, that's my to-do list for the day. I am so happy to do this. We probably will change this up to once a month just to make sure we're covering all our bases and allowing people that want to show up the opportunity.
So thank you guys so much for being here. Thank you for being a Griffin. supporter and Griffin customer, and we will see you next time.