Circle And NETGEAR Team Up For Enhanced Parental Control Features

[Julio Urquidi]

NETGEAR Orbi Wi-Fi Systems and Nighthawk routers will be getting better parental control features thanks to a partnership with Circle. The integration of the Circle app (for IOS and Android) gives parents additional services they can set or schedule to provide a safe online environment for kids and their devices.

Circle On NETGEAR is available in two plans. The free “Basic” plan includes filter levels for age appropriate content, device pausing, historical information regarding visited sites, safe search engine filters, and ad blocking.

The $4.99/month “Premium” service adds time limits, bedtime rules that disconnect a device from the network at the end of the day, device scheduling for “no internet access”, internet usage history, rewards functions that increase time limits, a personalized dashboard for each child, and smart home integration with Choremonster, IFTTT, and Amazon Alexa.

Circle on NETGEAR is currently available on select Nighthawk routers, while Orbi Wi-Fi systems will getting the service update through an upcoming firmware upgrade.

 

[Razor512]

Wow, and I thought the premium Canary plan was a bad deal, $5 per month for what are essentially time based filters.


The vast majority of its use cases can backfire and just cause enough issues to just have it become used as a punishment tool since selective restrictions can cause issues. Limit the kid to 30 minutes of YouTube usage, and you can guarantee that it will never be used for educational videos. Most parental control measures end up backfiring because they cannot properly deal with situations where additional time may be needed, they are also prone to false positives.

Beyond that, the features don't seem like they should need a monthly fee.

Most of the restrictions are the equivalent of a car maker selling a car and then putting the option to turn the headlights on behind a paywall. You will essentially pay a monthly fee to enable something that does not rely on the company doing anything for the device to function.

 

[pete y testing]

its mainly for those that think throwing money at their problem will solve it and no need to think any more about it

 

[thiggins]

The average consumer isn't as skilled in networking as you guys. It's actually a decent product.

 

[pete y testing]

It's actually a decent product.

the router of course is , the free version of the dysney circle is very limited , the paid for version does work but imho hardly any different to netgears free opendns which isnt that hard to use ether

 

[DanH]

its mainly for those that think throwing money at their problem will solve it and no need to think any more about it

Still beats parents who think there is no problem and do nothing, so there is that...

 

[David Richards]

The average consumer isn't as skilled in networking as you guys. It's actually a decent product.

That is fair point, actually a lot of companies are aiming for such things such as parental controls or monitoring system through their routers, apparently there is such a thing called Digital parenting.