YouTube have a safety setting so parents can allow children to browse YouTube with less risk of seeing offensive material. YouTube make it clear that use of the safety feature does not gaurantee a block of all explicit material.
How do you set up the safety feature on YouTube?
- To avail of this facility you need to have a YouTube account.
It is more effective if you implement the safety settings through a parent account as in this way even if your child has their own account they still cannot change the safety settings which apply to the computer as a whole.
If your child does not have a YouTube account but just browses YouTube on your computer the safety setting will still apply.
However if the child has their own computer or if there are other computers in the house they can use, you need to login to your YouTube account on each computer and set the safety mode. - To open an account on YouTube- sign up here! If you already have an account go to step 3
- Once you are logged into your account, scroll down to the bottom of the page where you should see the following:
- When you click on the word ‘Off’ which is a link you will get a new message (see image below).
- Click on the ‘Unlock Safety Mode setting’ button and you will be asked to log in again.
Once you do and go back down to the Safety Mode as seen in the first image the new message will now allow you to choose either On or Off. - When you choose ‘On’ and click on the ‘Save and lock…’ button the page will return to the top with a message saying ‘Successfully locked Safety Mode setting on this browser’.
- Now all you have to do is log out of YOUR account.
- If, after logging out, you go back to the bottom of the page it should say ‘Safety Mode: On’ and when you click on the word ‘On’ you will see the following message
This means that even if your child logs in using their own account they cannot change the Safety Settings.
IMPORTANT
- You have to do this for each browser i.e. FireFox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Etc. on your pc.
- It has to be done using your account, so you have control of when it is turned off.
- This does not gaurantee that NO offensive material will be viewed, YouTube states it is not 100% accurate.