Which websites your child visits

obacht can show you which websites your child's devices visit. It is off for every child until you turn it on, and your child's phone always shows that it is on and the same list you see. obacht is about limits, not surveillance: turn it on only if you need it.

What you see, and what you don't

With visited sites on, you see sites, such as youtube.com or wikipedia.org, with the times they were visited on each day, and which sites the website filter blocked. You don't see which pages your child opened, what they searched for or anything they did on a site: obacht only learns the site's name, from the device asking where the site is (DNS), and nothing of what is sent to it.

With sites and pages on, you also see the full address of every page your child opened in Firefox on a Windows or Linux PC, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=... or https://www.google.com/search?q=.... A page's address often shows what was searched for or watched, so this is the setting that tells you most: pick it only if you really need it, and talk with your child about it. Other browsers and phones stay at sites (see Which devices).

A few things to keep in mind when you read the list:

• Apps visit sites too. A game or a chat app connects to its own servers, so a site in the list was not necessarily opened by your child in a browser. obacht leaves out services devices use on their own (updates, ads, analytics, content delivery networks), but not every one of them.
• Times are lookups, not time spent. A visit runs from the first to the last time the device looked the site up, with less than ten minutes in between. How long a page stayed open isn't known. How long your child used a browser or app is in the History tab as usual.
• Not everything goes through obacht. A browser with its own secure DNS, a VPN app or another network's filter bypasses the list, just as it bypasses the website filter. See Platform limitations.

Turning it on

Open the child, then Settings → Website history, and pick:

• Nothing (off) (the default): nothing is recorded. Turning it off later deletes every visit obacht kept.
• Visited sites: sites and when they were visited, kept for 1 to 30 days (30 by default). Older visits are deleted every hour.
• Sites and pages: sites as above, and the full address of each page opened in Firefox, kept for the same number of days. Switching back to sites or off deletes every page address obacht kept.

The History tab then shows Websites that day under the day in detail, and with pages on, Pages opened in Firefox below it.

Which devices

• Android phones and tablets: through obacht's website filter, the small VPN that only handles website names. It runs while website history is on, even without website rules. The phone sends the sites with its next sync.
• TVs, consoles and other devices using obacht's DNS filter (DNS over HTTPS or TLS, see deploy): the server records the sites as it answers.
• Devices filtered through AdGuard Home are not recorded: obacht keeps AdGuard's query log switched off.
• Windows PCs: sites only if they use obacht's DNS filter. With sites and pages on, obacht's Windows agent installs obacht's Firefox extension through Firefox's own policy (the way schools and companies set up Firefox), so it can't be removed, and turns off private windows in Firefox, which would leave no history. Switching pages off removes the extension again.
• Linux PCs: see Firefox on Linux below.
• Chrome, Edge and other browsers show sites only. Chrome and Edge install extensions this way only from their stores, or on PCs managed by a company domain; see Platform limitations. On a PC where your child should only use Firefox, block the other browsers as apps.

Firefox on Linux

There is no obacht agent for Linux yet. To record pages there, an administrator of the PC runs obacht's setup script once, with a pairing code from Devices → Add device (any platform):

sudo ./firefox-linux.sh https://obacht.example.org 123456 "Laptop"

It pairs the PC as a device, fetches the extension's own key and writes Firefox's policy (/etc/firefox/policies/policies.json). sudo ./firefox-linux.sh --remove takes the extension away again. The script is in obacht's repository. Unlike on Windows, the extension stays installed when you switch pages off; it then sends nothing.

What your child sees

On the phone, obacht's card "What your parents see" says that you can see which websites the phone connects to, for how many days, and, with pages on, that you also see the pages opened in Firefox on a PC. Below the day's timeline the phone lists Websites today, the same sites you see. A child with their own login sees the same list you do. In Firefox, obacht's icon in the toolbar says whether pages are recorded and for how many days, and lists today's pages, the same you see.

Through the API

website_history and website_history_days on PATCH /api/v1/children/{id}, GET /api/v1/children/{id}/websites?date=YYYY-MM-DD for a day's visits, and for devices POST /api/v1/device/websites and GET /api/v1/device/websites. website_history is off, sites or pages. A device gets a token for the browser extension with POST /api/v1/device/browser-token; the extension sends pages to POST /api/v1/browser/pages and reads GET /api/v1/browser/state and GET /api/v1/browser/websites. See /api/v1/openapi.json on your server.

This page is part of obacht's documentation, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Source on GitHub · CC BY 4.0 · Version: main (2ab2740)