262

Block (Blacklist) certain websites

I need to have the ability to block certain websites in the profiles area. It would also be great to have the ability to whitelist certain sites as well. 

191 replies

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    • pvjones
    • 5 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    weaves Jeff C. Sorry to bump this thread, but can we get an idea if this feature is or will be on the product roadmap? Due to known issues involving use of Eero with Circle, I would like to know if I should stick with Eero, or ditch it and by a Circle along with a different router.

      • Drew
      • 5 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      Thanks for checking in pvjones!

      While we don't plan to share a product roadmap publicly for the foreseeable future, we appreciate your continued interest! We don’t have a specific update to share on blacklisting, but we hear you and understand the benefit of custom URL blocking beyond the pre-set categories of eero Plus content filtering. Given the feature's status as "Under Consideration," I can assure you it’s something we're continuing to actively evaluate and explore. 

      In the meantime, with the proper network configuration and topology, Disney Circle should continue to be a viable and consistent parental control device. If you're having any trouble getting Circle to work on your network, please reach out to our support team at support@eero.com – if you put "Community Feedback" and my name somewhere in the subject line, I'll make sure we get a senior specialist to take a look and help out ASAP! Thanks again so much for your time, and for being a valuable voice in the Community!

      Kindly,
      Drew, the Community Team

      • krombein
      • 3 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      Drew This is old news. I tried to use Disney Circle with my Eero network, and something about a recent change in the Disney Circle system makes it incompatible with Eeros. I went back and forth with both DisneyCircle and Eero about it and could not get anything to work. I ultimately had to return the Circle.

    • Dave_H
    • 5 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Hi Drew,

    I was on my way to buy a eero system until, en-route, I researched this one topic and then found your system doesn't meet my requirements. Many parents would like to be able to block certain websites. As was mentioned earlier in the thread YouTube during homework hours being a specific example. You should provide this functionality soon before a competitor gets ahead of you and purchasers like me go elsewhere.

    Regards.

    • jcasares
    • 5 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    I would buy eero plus in a second if you provided a "whitelist only" feature.

    • Web Developer and Network Engineer
    • Jeff_Coughlin
    • 5 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    I too have children who while doing homework on their laptops sneak off to other services. Yes, we try to be good parents and watch everything they are doing, but we have to be honest with ourselves and understand that times are changing and we need to change with them. That said, it's been a year since people have been requesting this functionality to be added to the Eero Plus service and it doesn't seem likely this will be added any time soon (if at all). A quick search around and it looks Google WiFi (a competitor home mesh router) supports this as well as a few other competitors. Others here have suggested Disney Circle (an add-on device to go between your router and home network). So the question stands: Are you actually considering adding this functionality, or just hanging a virtual carrot in front of us (by saying that you've been considering it all this time) to attempt to keep us around? It's okay to say that you don't plan to support it (perhaps the number of people requesting this type of functionality is actually pretty small, or perhaps the storage space for a small json file is not even feasible on the Eero to store a list of IPs/Domain (I highly doubt this)), but at least let us know so that we can consider another option or service.

    Thanks!

    • jwkesterson
    • 4 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    In the meantime (while we wait for Eero Plus to allow this), if your child is using an iOS device you can block access to specific sites using the ScreenTime feature and 'Content Restrictions'

    • Skeeter
    • 4 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Would would really be nice is if Eero Plus could leverage ScreenTime via an API and use either the settings in ScreenTime to turn off or allow access or for that matter changes made in Eero Plus would push back to ScreenTime for either App restrictions or URL restrictions.  Unfortunately doing a little research, there currently is no public API yet for ScreenTime that would allow eero to implement something like this.

    • jcasares
    • 4 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    I was able to get fine-grained, per-device restrictions (blacklist, whitelist, categories, time) using Circle with my Eero (v1). Setup was a bit tricky but worth it.

    • Sawickipedia
    • 4 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    I can’t believe this feature has not been added yet.  As a parent it’s a must have.

    • mfractal
    • 4 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Why hadn't this been added? And why eero plus?! This is such a basic feature. I didn't even think to confirm this is possible before buying eero because I was sure it's there. Makes me want to scrap eero for another solution. 

      • dshudson
      • 2 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      mfractal seriously, this is such a scam,  2.99 to block a site.  I'm getting rid of eero

      • dshudson
      • 2 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      mfractal seriously, this is such a scam,  2.99 to block a site.  I'm getting rid of eero

      • mfractal
      • 2 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      dshudson extremely shitty from their part. i don't pay that shit, waht i did is setup a pihole DNS and i am filtering everything i need via it's interface plus it filters all the ads/trackers etc so that's an added benefit. 

      • Asheboy
      • 2 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      mfractal unfortunately, pi-hole won't help if devices don't use your network broadcast DNS. Chromecasts will use the Google dns if available, so you need to block this on your router, which cant be done on Eeros.

      • mfractal
      • 2 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      Asheboy Well yeah, you're right. if the device chooses to ignore the broadcast DNS by the router not gonna help unfortunately. I honestly expected NOT to be needing to jump through all these hoops with eero. Quite a disapponitment at that area.

    • robywar
    • 4 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    This is huge, please implement this ASAP. I would love to block ad domains as well as specific sites at specific times.

    • LRW33
    • 4 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Any update on this feature - I've been waiting for this change.  I am going to have to start investing options outside Eero plus if this is still on the long term backlog.

    • ken91
    • 4 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Please provide a status update for this request?  I paid a large amount of money for the Eero ($450) and Eero plus ($100) and was very surprised to learn this very basic feature is not available?  Eero plus is not blocking adult content.  My kids are still able to pull up adult videos on YouTube.  Do you have ant ETA when this will be implemented?  If not I will return the Eero and get a refund.  I can pickup a router for less than $50 that has this feature without paying for a service (Eero plus) that does not work.

    • robywar
    • 4 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    For all concerned, I got this reply on reddit to a question about it:

    "It would involve implementing, at a bare minimum, a shared secret architecture for keeping your blacklist secret from us, but known to your nodes and to you, a secure way of interposing in the DNS flow, and cloud and app support for all of this. This is because we don't ever want to know what sites you're visiting, and our architecture is designed to prevent that information from ever reaching eero infrastructure- for privacy.

    We've recently introduced a secure communications layer to the eeroOS platform, called NIMBLE; we wrote a blog post about it. That's the first step towards features like this (and also, a critical enabling step towards no-WAN startup, which sounds like it should be easy but actually creates a whole bunch of corner cases that we had to solve).

    There's a lot of stuff we're working on, like this feature, where it turns out we have to build something new before we can get started on this in particular. But when we build those new things, it turns out we can use them to build other compelling features and experiences- it just takes time."

      • Web Developer and Network Engineer
      • Jeff_Coughlin
      • 4 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      robywar They are likely looking at it wrong. There are a number of ways this could be handled (without anyone knowing what sites you visit). From multi-leveled data encryption to simply just storing the data on the router itself (assuming it has storage capacity - which it wouldn’t require much), there are very simple solutions to get this to work (without the need to involve a monthly fee - we were just offering that as compensation). Other competitors are already offering similar solutions.

      Personally I’d just store the data as a one-way hash (if you’re paranoid about rainbow tables, then add some salt values, but I’d really think that would be way overkill). That way all you have to do is hash the value and compare them. No website data is actually stored. When I got into data encryption 20 years ago, these solutions were already considered old technology, yet they are still used today because they work extremely well, Have little-to-no performance hit, and require very little data storage.

    • derekbelrose
    • 4 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    At the very least, make this an option in Eero Plus.  I pay $100 a year to get the subscription that includes safe filtering.  Who determines Safe Filtering?  With Facebook and Google leaching all data through "analytics", I feel my data is unsafe.

    For $30, one time, I could install Pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi and get this functionality without it calling home anywhere. Seems like Eero should be able to implement this as well without years of engineering.

      • Drew
      • 4 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts, derekbelrose, and welcome to the Community. You raise some really good points, so I'd like to take a moment to offer a little more information and context about how eero Plus works. 

      First and foremost, it's important for me to emphasize that neither the the eero system neither records nor logs your network traffic – in other words, the eero doesn't see which websites you're visiting. This is a crucial privacy point for us, and it ties in to how eero Plus works as well. Rather than being something operating on the eero locally, eero Plus actually happens at the DNS level, with all network traffic being routed through a database. That database only checks DNS requests, and filters them in accordance with the particular settings you have enabled via the app based solely on the DNS entry.

      With this in mind, you can see how adding a feature that allows users to name specific sites or domains to block would require us to rework not only how the eero handles traffic, but also change our philosophy about user privacy. That said, this isn't a feature that we've absolutely written out, and our product team continues to explore ways that we can potentially implement this functionality while staying true to our value of user privacy.

      We definitely appreciate your thoughts on this, and we encourage you to absolutely pursue any other workarounds that you feel would be a better fit for your network. One of the great things about eero is that it plays very wells with a lot of homebrew solutions, and you wouldn't be the first user to supplement your eero network with a Raspberry Pi. We welcome you again to the Community, and look forward to your future thoughts!

      Kindly,
      Drew, eero Community Team

      • derekbelrose
      • 4 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      Drew I truly appreciate your response and I do acknowledge and appreciate Eero’s commitment to user privacy.  I only wish I could take advantage of the Eero plus filtering and use a pi-hole.  I haven’t given it much thought on how to do that...possibly by sending the Eero’s DNS through the pi-hole before going out to the internet...

      This is a great product.  I hope that Eero continues their dedication to user privacy and making it a priority in the engineering of products.........

      Or at least let us know if the company is forced to discontinue that policy by corporate overlords :)

      Anyway, thank you for the warm welcome. I look forward to giving my numerous opinions

    • iball99
    • 4 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    This is a must for eero plus. In fact I couldn't believe it wasn't when I signed up. Please get this added to the consideration list. There are other wifi systems doing this and if this doesn't get added I'll be forced to switching.

    • vtcc93
    • 4 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Drew, thank you for your update.  As a user, I understand your desire, and frankly my desire for privacy and the fact that Eero doesn't track my internet use, however as a Parent, that is paying $100 a year for safe filtering and monitoring, I struggle with the need to be able to at times block certain domains, specifically gaming domains like Fortnite and YouTube while still allowing access to the internet for school work.  

     

    I respectfully request someone from Eero either give a timeline (days, weeks, months) or honestly answer if this is a bridge to far with your privacy concerns.  That will give me the option of waiting for it to be implemented or looking at other ways of blocking.

    I have been waiting for this to be implemented for longer than I believe it should have taken.

    Thanks,

    VTCC93

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  • 262 Votes
  • 8 mths agoLast active
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