FAQ
Questions, answered properly
Including the ones with an uncomfortable answer.
Getting started
What is the actual order of operations?
Create an account in a browser, download the installer for your PC or Mac, sign in inside it, choose whether you are setting up an Android device or the computer itself, follow the wizard, then customise everything from your dashboard. The same six steps with detail on each.
One download does both jobs — the computer protection travels inside it rather than as a second file to find — and it is a free download for Windows and Mac.
Signing in inside the installer is optional: skip it and it hands you a pairing code at the end, which you type into "Add a tablet" in your dashboard to link the device instead.
Do I need a computer at all, or can I do it from my phone?
You need a computer once, to set up an Android device — supervision is granted over a USB cable and there is no over-the-air route to it. After that a phone is enough: the dashboard opens in any browser and is built for one hand. A parent app is a remote control wherever you run it: the supervised device is always an Android tablet or phone, or a Windows PC or Mac.
Can I lock down the family computer as well as a tablet?
Yes, from the same account and dashboard. The two are not identical: on Windows the categories and sites you block stop resolving for every browser and app, and on a Mac the family-safe filter covers the whole machine but individual sites you name are not blocked. The remote rest switch is Android-only. Compare the platforms.
Can I switch the device off from my phone when I want?
On an Android tablet or phone, yes. One toggle rests that device: the apps you marked essential — an alarm, a way to call you — stay reachable and everything else stops. Schedules do the same thing on a timetable, from the device's own clock, so they still fire with the internet down.
It is not instantaneous. The device checks in for its settings every so often, so expect a switch to land within about half a minute rather than the moment you tap. A computer does not have this switch yet.
Setting up
Do I really have to factory reset the tablet?
In most cases, yes. Android only grants supervision to a device with no accounts signed in, so a tablet already in use has to be reset first. Back up photos and anything else that matters, reset, run setup, then sign back in.
A brand-new tablet out of the box needs no reset — set it up with ParentProof before you sign into anything.
Will my child lose the Play Store?
No. Supervision does not remove Google Play or block Google accounts. You sign in after setup and Play works normally. What is blocked is installing apps from a web download, outside the store — which is a different thing.
On an Amazon Fire the answer is different, because there is no Play Store to begin with. The Fire situation in full.
Does it work on an Amazon Fire tablet?
No. Amazon Fire tablets are not supported, in any generation, and there is no ParentProof setup path on Fire OS — the installer detects a Fire device and stops rather than leaving you part-way through. Fire OS does not hand out the protected management role ParentProof needs, and the account you would have to remove to try is the same account that provides the only app store on the device.
If you have already bought one, it is not a settings problem and nothing on our side will change it. Use a supported Android tablet instead. The Fire situation in full.
How long does it take?
About ten minutes per tablet once you have the cable in hand, plus the reset if one is needed. It is a one-time job — day-to-day changes are made from your dashboard in a browser, not over USB.
Do I need to be technical?
You need to be able to follow a wizard and plug in a USB cable. The parts that are genuinely fiddly — one hidden switch in the tablet's settings, removing an account, Samsung's Auto Blocker — are each explained on screen at the moment they are needed, with the exact taps for your device.
How strong is it, really
Can a determined teenager get around it?
The usual routes are closed: there is no switch in Settings, safe mode is blocked, a second profile cannot be created, the tablet cannot be reset from itself, and apps cannot be installed from a web download. Android enforces all of that itself, not an app a child could close.
What we will not tell you is that it is unbeatable. A physical factory reset through the recovery menu removes supervision — it also wipes the tablet, and you will notice. Someone with a computer, real intent and time can do things a filter cannot prevent. If your teenager is at that level, this is a conversation, not a product.
What if my child just changes the clock to defeat the time limit?
There is a switch for that: it blocks changing the date and time on the tablet. It is optional because on some devices it also gets in the way of legitimate things, so you decide.
Can they use a VPN or another service to get around the filter?
It depends on whether ParentProof’s own filtering connection is running on that device, and the two answers are different enough that one sentence would be wrong for half of you.
On a tablet running it: Android runs one VPN at a time, and ParentProof is pinned as that one by the device-owner setup your installer performed — a child cannot swap it for a VPN of their own from the tablet, and with egress control switched on the VPN settings screen itself is locked. The visible sign is a small key in the status bar: that key is ParentProof’s filtering connection, it is normal, and it stays there the whole time protection is on. We describe the mechanism rather than promise an outcome for every device and every app on the shelf — test yours.
Where it is not running — protection paused, a device set up without it, or a Windows or Mac computer — a VPN, or a private lookup service we do not control, can get round website filtering. Blocking new app installs and locking the device to your filter reduces that risk; it is not a guarantee.
What does not change either way: apps are allow-only, so an app you did not allow cannot open at all. And test the exact device and apps before you rely on the filter.
What happens if your servers go down?
The tablet stays locked down. Policy is enforced on the device; our server is how you change it, not how it is applied. An outage means you cannot adjust settings for a while. It does not mean the tablet opens up.
So can my child only visit sites I have approved?
Not quite. Apps are allow-only: nothing opens unless you named it. Sites are filtered rather than allow-listed — you choose a family-safe filtering service, the tablet is locked to it so it cannot be changed there, and adult sites stop opening. The list of categories belongs to the service you picked, and neither of the two we offer covers gambling.
That filtering reaches almost every app on the device. It does not reach a browser that looks sites up privately on its own — Firefox does this out of the box — and a site opened by typing its raw numeric address is never looked up at all. Both of those are still bounded by the allow-list, because an app you did not allow cannot open in the first place. The full picture.
Do I have to name every bad site myself?
No. Tick a category — adult content, gambling — and ParentProof blocks it from a list of more than a million sites that is refreshed every day. Name individual sites on top of that when you want to.
The other half is the app allow-list: something you did not allow does not open at all, so there is no site inside it to filter. How the two fit together.
Could a category rule block my child from looking for help?
No, and this is not a policy we could quietly change — it is built into the product. Suicide lines, gambling self-exclusion, sexual health and abuse support are marked unblockable, and ParentProof refuses to save a rule that would block one. Only your own explicit rule about one specific address can override that.
Privacy
Do you read my child's messages or browsing?
Messages, no — we do not collect message content from any app, and we are not building a surveillance feed for you to read. The dashboard can show a website only when ParentProof denied that host; it is not a transcript of a child's life.
Browsing history is limited to blocked host denials from ParentProof's kid browser, such as example.com, kept for 30 days. Allowed visits are not recorded. Chrome and other browsers produce no ParentProof browsing history. The full list of what is collected.
Can I see my child's screen?
Not in the current release. It is switched off in everything we ship, and our published privacy contract forbids enabling it.
The privacy page sets out exactly what is and is not collected from a device.
Does anything about my child reach a marketing tool?
No, and it is built into the product rather than promised in a policy. Anything on its way to a marketing tool has to pass a filter that refuses it outright if it carries a device identifier or anything measured from a child's device — whatever the message claims to be. The detail.
What do you keep if I delete my account?
Deleting the account removes the household and what is attached to it — devices, profiles, policies, activity, screenshots. Three things survive: the security audit log with your identifier replaced by a one-way hash, the record of who was added to or removed from a household, and an email left on the waiting list back when there was one. The first two survive on purpose, so one adult in a household cannot erase the record of their own actions by closing the account. The third is a leftover rather than a design — the waiting list is closed and nobody can join it now, but an address left while it was open is attached to no account, so deleting one never reaches it; ask and we will remove it. Why, in full.
Your child’s devices are released, not stranded. Every linked device is told to stand down before anything is erased, and that instruction waits for any device that is offline at the time — so it is still there when the tablet next connects, even though the account is gone by then. The exception is a tablet that never connects again: it keeps its last rules. If a device is broken, lost or permanently offline, release it from the dashboard first. Otherwise you can just delete.
When it goes wrong
The setup app cannot see my tablet.
Almost always one of three things: USB debugging is not on, the "Allow USB debugging?" prompt on the tablet has not been accepted, or the cable is charge-only. The setup app checks each and says which. If it still cannot see it, send us a report from inside the app — it attaches what it saw.
Something is broken and I do not know what to tell you.
Press the report button in the setup app or the "Something not working?" card in your dashboard, and describe it in your own words. Technical detail is attached automatically, redacted, and only if you leave that box ticked. That is genuinely enough — you do not need to diagnose anything.
I want to undo everything.
Each installer has a reverse and each one is documented on the support page. The tablet can be handed back to you unsupervised, and the computer installers restore what they changed.