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The Filtering Policy Privacy tab combines tools designed to protect users from explicit content, minimize invasive tracking, and reduce online advertising distractions. 

These privacy settings can be enabled individually or together to match the needs of your organization or user groups. If you're unsure where to start, we recommend enabling Moderate settings first, then adjusting based on feedback or reporting insights.

SafeSearch & YouTube Restrictive Mode

SafeSearch is a setting that prevents explicit or offensive content from appearing in search results. DNSFilter allows you to enforce SafeSearch across popular search engines, including:

• Google
• Bing
• DuckDuckGo
• Ecosia
• Yandex
• YouTube (via Restricted Mode)

When SafeSearch is enabled, search engines automatically block results related to inappropriate or suggestive queries. End users won’t see any results for those types of searches, and they can’t disable this setting manually.

YouTube Restrictive Mode offers two levels of filtering:

• Moderate – Filters some mature content but allows broader access
• Strict – Applies a tighter filter, blocking more content flagged by YouTube

These settings use YouTube’s internal classification system, which considers metadata, titles, descriptions, user flags, and age restrictions.

Advertising & Tracker Blocking

DNSFilter also provides the option to block advertisements and web trackers. These settings result in a NODATA response, meaning no DNS record is returned, rather than showing a traditional block page.

Ads

This setting blocks domains known to serve or host advertisements, reducing distractions and improving load times.

• Moderate (Advertising Lite): Allows ads from trusted platforms (like Google); blocks others
• Strict (Advertising): Blocks ads from all domains

Trackers

Trackers collect behavioral data and follow users across websites. Blocking them increases user privacy.

• Moderate (Trackers Lite): Blocks most trackers but allows those from trusted services
• Strict (Trackers): Blocks all known tracking domains

Enforce Privacy in a Filtering Policy

Follow these steps to enable SafeSearch, or block ads or trackers.

1. From the DNSFilter dashboard, navigate to Policies and select Filtering
2. Select the Policy
3. Tab to Privacy
4. Block ads or trackers: Select the title block. It will turn blue and have a icon, just like blocked categories or threats
5. Enable SafeSearch: Toggle the options to enforce within the Policy
6. Select Save Policy

Once enabled, any user that tries to disable SafeSearch from their device is blocked from changing those controls and ads/trackers will return a NODATA response.

Test SafeSearch

Navigate to any of the search engine's settings in Incognito Mode to test that the settings can't be changed from the browser. 

You can also test to confirm SafeSearch is enforced through command line: a simple nslookup should show the following results:

Google

nslookup www.google.com

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:    forcesafesearch.google.com
Address:  216.239.38.120
Aliases:  www.google.com

YouTube

nslookup www.youtube.com

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:     restrictmoderate.youtube.com
Addresses:  2001:4860:4802:32::78
          216.239.38.120
Aliases:  www.youtube.com

Bing

nslookup www.bing.com

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:    a-0017.a-msedge.net
Address:  204.79.197.220
Aliases:  www.bing.com
          strict.bing.com
          strict-bing-com.a-0001.a-msedge.net

Microsoft Bing’s last listed alias may change based on geo-location! As long as you are seeing “strict” you are all set!