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Kids in my local elementary school are more reliant on online learning during worldwide coronavirus stay-at-home lockdown. Almost all of their schoolwork can be done within just a browser.

Does the Raspberry Pi 4 have any parental controls like

  • limiting the time a kid is logged into the device (e.g. logout after X hours/day)
  • access to specific URLs (e.g. classroom etc)
  • disallowing installing additional apps/games

Very similar to Apple's screentime feature on iOS and macOS. My kid is setup with iOS and macOS but I know other kids need something more frugal. I am open to other distros other than Debian/Raspbian. Briefly looked at ChromeOS on Raspberry (=FydeOS) but family link/child accounts is broken there.

Like most security or safety systems, I understand it can't be perfect (e.g. swap SD cards). I'm also not interested in off-topic discussions like parenting styles etc.

Thanks

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  • Though not directly a Pi solution, a change in DNS can help restrict sites that can be accessed - see opendns.com/home-internet-security for a free option.
    – user115418
    Apr 21, 2020 at 1:26
  • You should be able to use PiHole as a blocking proxy.
    – Dougie
    Apr 21, 2020 at 9:03
  • The Pi (any version) is a piece of hardware, in itself there are no such restrictions available. Adding restrictions would need to be done with software. However these types of restrictions are best implemented by the network gateway(s), Not at the client devices where disabling or circumventing restrictions can be achieved much easier by your end users.
    – Charemer
    Apr 21, 2020 at 9:44
  • Welcome to Raspberry Pi :-) But your question is too broad and opinion based. Such questions are flagged and may be closed. This site isn't made for brainstorming and discuss general issues. It is made to do one specific question that can be answered detailed. Please take the short Tour and visit the Help Center to get an idea how things work here.
    – Ingo
    Apr 22, 2020 at 8:28

2 Answers 2

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limiting the time a kid is logged into the device

Check out  timeoutd, timekpr-next and similar software packages.

access to specific URLs (e.g. classroom etc)

Disable DNS and whitelist all hosts your students need to access in /etc/hosts

disallowing installing additional apps/games

Don't add them to sudo group to limit access to games available via apt. The whitelist mentioned above will exclude games the students could download. Blacklisting mass storage devices or physically blocking USB ports will prevent them installing any games they could have brought on a USB drive.

Speaking of obnoxious parenting styles, there are packages such as logkeys which store everything a user is typing on the keyboard for later inspection. I'm not saying it's a good option, but it's there if you need it. Mind that it may be illegal to spy on kids in some cases, and especially so if the kids are not your own and their parents didn't consent to such measures.

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No parental control can be 100% efficient. On a r-pi, Pi-Hole is probably the easiest option. If you want to have something completely configurable (and if you have some time) you can look at squid/squidGuard as a proxy filter. Here is an example: https://mizuki.ch/documentation/parental_control/

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