8Automatically Assign New Devices into Safe Profile
Eero currently has it setup so a new device has full access to the internet. I want a way to put all new devices into a “safe” profile with parental controls enabled. It’s too much work to manually add devices to the profiles, and often it does not even recognize what the device is so you’re guessing.
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Totally Agree with this. I just bought into Eero to protect my family, and with profiles, it just seems like a no-brainer to allow users to hit a toggle on the profile that will automatically place new devices into it. Now I am debating returning the entire thing and using a Firewalla with my old Google Wifi system. I personally don't mind the $10 a month as long as it is for solid parental controls. Many devices will automatically change their MAC address for privacy purposes, and when that happens, any assignment to a profile is lost. It is just too easy for children to circumvent the controls as long as unrecognized devices get free access to everything on the internet.
On an Apple device, the higlighted toggle in the attached image is enabled by default. in fact, the Privacy warning on the top warns you if you toggle it off. IF that TOGGLE IS SELECTED, the entirety of EERO's Parental Controls are 100% useless. This is because the device will be recongized as "New" and will be no longer associated to any profiles. Please make the straightforward change and enable default Profiles.
Thank you.
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Why would an engineer design “parental controls” to work like this? I stopped paying the subscription because of this. If they’re going to charge $99/year, it should not be something any child can bypass with an Apple device.
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The complete answer to your question is a long one. Long story short, the engineer did not design it this way. Features and functions are primarily designed by what is called a product owner. The product owner maintains a list of features that should be rolled out and the order in which to do it. I have found that many product owners focus on the procedure, rather than truly approaching the product through the eyes of the consumer. The number one feature touted in the secure subscription is parental controls. I would be willing to bet that the product owner does not have children in the 8 to 16 year old range. As someone coming from 20 years of software development, I can say that allowing a profile to be selected as default is actually a very trivial change given what they have already created. When a new device joins, my network, I get notified immediately. That means they are already tracking new devices and have a mechanism to recognize when a MAC address has not been seen before. They must already have the concept of profiles and the API to add devices to a profile, otherwise, their application couldn’t do that. Making a profile the default simply requires the UI change to toggle and track which profile is the default, and a quick call to the API when a new device is detected to add that device to the default profile. Personally, I would be surprised. If a good developer or two (one for the UI and one for the API) couldn’t accomplish this in less than one day given the infrastructure they already have in place. Of course there’s testing, but this too should be relatively easy to test.
This would allow people to automatically restrict what devices can access on the Internet if the MAC address has never been seen before.
This is a very simple change to close a very large hole in parental controls. I really hope they read this suggestion and implement the change. Don’t get me wrong. There are other holes in parental controls, but those are harder to exploit and harder to close. This is what we call low hanging fruit.
