How to Effectively Monitor Safari on a child's iPhone
Learn how to effectively monitor a child's Safari activity to see exactly what websites are being accessed on a child's device.
If you want to monitor Safari activity on your child's iPhone or iPad to see what websites are being visited, what is being search for, and what your child is actually looking at, you might have considered a solution like Screen Time. Screen Time provides some activity monitoring, but not the full picture, so we highly recommend combining it with other monitoring techniques that we'll walk through in this guide. Fortunately, there are effective approaches that go a step further and comprehensively monitor websites a child visited on the Safari app.
Instead of visiting each website in your child's Safari history to see if problematic content was accessed, parents can use an app like LivingRoom for Families to view screenshots of exactly what was looked at in Safari (as well as other browsers). LivingRoom automatically alerts parents if explicit or suggestive content was accessed, which reduces the monitoring burden significantly.
In this guide, we'll walk you through setting up Screen Time to monitor Safari activity and extending Screen Time monitoring with the LivingRoom app so that screenshots of pages visited in Safari can be viewed.
Choosing an effective approach for monitoring websites visited in Safari on a child's iPhone
Kids can easily stumble on explicit websites and images or other problematic content in Safari even if they searched for something innocent. As a result, granting Safari access to a child should come with strict guardrails and comprehensive monitoring.
Apple's Screen Time solution can give parents some visibility and control over websites visited in Safari. There's a built-in adult website filter a parent can turn on, which reduces the chances a child accesses explicit content in Safari. Additionally, Screen Time can provide basic visibility into website URLs visited in Safari and a parent can visit websites to see what content was looked at..
But there's a few ways this approach falls short:
Screen Time's visibility into what was actually accessed in Safari is very limited and not always useful. A parent can see the website domain and icon, but will need to manually visit the website to see if it's problematic.
Even worse: a parent has to constantly check Safari history to ensure a child is using Safari safely. This is incredibly tough to keep up with and parents will likely feel overwhelmed.
Lastly, and probably the biggest gap, a child might visit a website like Reddit, which hosts a wide range of content, from innocent hobbies to extremely explicit content.
So a parent can't rely on seeing "reddit.com" listed in Screen Time's activity logs. A parent actually has to go directly to Safari history and see which pages a child visited on reddit.com. This is almost an impossible task.
This is where an app like LivingRoom can fill in the gaps and relieve some of the monitoring burden through screenshot-based Safari monitoring.
Additionally, LivingRoom sends parents alerts if sensitive content was viewed by a child .
If you're truly concerned about what your child is accessing in Safari (you should be), follow the rest of this setup guide to see how to set up Screen Time Safari monitoring alongside the LivingRoom app for the most effective monitoring approach.
Setting up Basic Safari Monitoring with Screen Time
Screen Time can be used for basic website and app monitoring.
We recommend that parents set up a child’s device using Apple Family Sharing because Screen Time settings and activity data can be viewed from a parent’s device without having physical access to the child's iPhone. Learn how to set up Apple Family in our parent's guide to setting up a child's iPhone .
Once you have Apple Family set up, here's how to enable Safari monitoring:
- Open the Settings app and go to
Family > Your Child > Screen Time > App & Website Activity. Ensure this is enabled and set up
When a website is visited, you can see it appear in the list of apps/websites:
Monitor all activity in Safari with LivingRoom for Families
The better approach for parents (or accountability partners helping an adult) is to use screenshot monitoring to comprehensively track how Safari is being used:
If you’re using an app like LivingRoom for Families, screenshot monitoring is also combined with automatic nudity detection and suggestive content alerts , so you can focus on potential alerts only and see the surrounding context:
When nudity is detected anywhere on the iPhone’s screen, LivingRoom shuts off the internet for that device and sends an alert immediately when sensitive content is viewed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a child delete Safari activity to bypass monitoring?
No, as long as a parent has also turned on Limit Adult Websites in Screen Time. Safari private browsing and browser history deletion is disabled if you also enable Screen Time’s adult website filter:
- Go to
Screen Time>Content & Privacy Restrictionsand ensure this is enabled. - Go to
App Store, Media, Web, & Games>Web Content. - Switch this to “Limit Adult Websites".
This disables several features at once, including private browsing and the ability to delete Safari browsing history.