The Complete Guide on Monitoring and Parental Control on a Chromebook and Disabling Incognito Mode - Part 1

[This is a 5-part series. Here are links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.]

My teenage daughter uses a Chromebook for her school work and assignments. Chromebook is a lightweight laptop computer running Chrome OS. Here lightweight is both in terms of the computing power and the actual weight. The biggest benefits of a Chromebook is that: 1. It is very cheap!! (Such as the one below for only $139.91 on Amazon.) 2. It has long battery life (11+ hours). 3. It is very light (Solid State Drive) and also durable (Solid State Drive).

As a responsible parent, I want to make sure that when my teenage daughter uses the laptop, she is not wasting time watching online videos, online window shopping, access inappropriate contents, or wasting time on social media. So in this post I'll share my findings on the many ways of monitoring and parental control on a Chromebook.

Problem Statement:

Know what web sites my daughter wastes time on when she is at home with a school managed Google Suite account (because her school has monitoring of their own) without me spending too much time or spend any money on new hardware devices.

Option 1: Control at the router and network level

1.1 Use DNS Servers

DNS stands for Domain Name Server. The server is responsible for translating easy to memorize domain names (such as lannyland.com) to an IP address (such as 67.222.38.97), so your app or browser can find the actual web server hosting the service. Without a DNS server, your device would have no idea where to go when you put in a web address. All your phones and computers are configured to use a DNS server so they can function correctly. In most cases, the DNS server is managed by your Internet Service Provider or a big tech company that offers free ones (e.g., Google).

Since a DNS server is the translator in between, it can do two things:
1. Log what translation queries it received, and
2. Decide if a translation should be made.

For parents, this means:
1. You can see what web sites and web pages were visited in logs.
2. Use a filter service on the DNS server to deny translation requests for bad web sites by their names (URLs).

If you are an expert in managing computer networks, you can run your own DNS server at home. It has been a long time since I ran full suite of networking services at home, and I don't want to spend the time to set all these up at home. So not a solution for me.

Another option is to use free services like OpenDNS (they have paid services too). You will need to sign up an account with them and then configure your system(s) to use their DNS servers.

Pros:

• Even the free version lets you see stats and logs of domains visited (only for 14 days).
• With the free version you can also block individual domains or user existing filters to block websites by category (e.g., Social Media Sites).

Cons:

• You need to know your router's IPV4 address at your ISP in order to create the network in OpenDNS dashboard. It's actually really easy to find it. Simply type "what is my ip address" in your Google search box while connected to your home network and Google will tell you. Your IPV4 address is most likely a dynamic IP address (vs. a static IP address), which means it can change from time to time (luckily, not very often). OpenVPN's solution is to install a client on your computer that will automatically update OpenVPN when the IP address changes. But you will have to install that on a different computer, because there is no client available for Chromebook. Or, just update the IP address in OpenDNS settings when it changes.
• If you set your router to use OpenDNS's DNS servers, you can't tell who visited the web sites (e.g., both my wife and my daughter visit shopping web sites). So instead, you should set up custom DNS just for the computer you want to monitor. This also means it works best when you only need to monitor one kid.
• This only works if the device you want to monitor connects to your home network.
• Stats are logs are only made available to you once each hour with a big delay (hours). If you don't need to know very quickly what your kids are browsing, this might be a solution for you.
• Stats and logs are actually not very informative:
• There's no timestamp on when a domain is visited and how much time is spent there. 
• The smallest range is a day, so you can't pin point domains visited by hour.
• Logging is also at domain/subdomain level, so there's no info on what web pages were visited.
• All the domains visited by scripts in web pages (such as auto ads, tracking, etc.) are also tracked, creating a long list of entries. For example, during the 6 hours I tracked, my daughter visited 724 unique domains, and during the peak hour, she visited over 500 unique domains (see screen captures below). This makes finding what websites she really visited a very time consuming task.

Example of useless domains tracked. Note the number of entries.

Example graph for unique domains visited during a 6-hour period.

If you think this meet your parental control needs, go to the links below to get more information. But it is clearly not a satisfactory solution for me.

Differences Between the Free and Paid Service Plans
How to Use OpenDNS on Your Router, PC, Tablet, or Smartphone
How to Change the DNS Server on a Chromebook


That's it for today's post. Make sure to read:

Part 2 of the Complete Guide

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://lanny.lannyland.com