Technical Evaluation of Android Parental Control Tools and PDNS Filtering Services: The Chilean Context

The growing exposure of Children and Adolescents (C&A) to online risks has led to the widespread adoption of parental control tools. However, in Chile, the legal framework that requires ISPs to offer such solutions does not establish minimum standards for the functionality or effectiveness of th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE access Vol. 13; pp. 186523 - 186536
Main Authors: Rojas, Nicolas, Boettcher, Nicolas, Jativa, Pablo Palacios, Sanchez, Ivan
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Piscataway IEEE 2025
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects:
Accuracy
Android
Applications programs
best practice for legal compliance
children and adolescents (C&A)
cyber-physical systems (CPS)
Effectiveness
evaluation of applications
Filtration
incident detection and response
Law
Mobile applications
Mobile computing
Operating systems
parental control
PD control
Protection
protective DNS (PDNS)
Resistance
Reviews
Web and internet services
Websites
ISSN:2169-3536, 2169-3536
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Summary:The growing exposure of Children and Adolescents (C&A) to online risks has led to the widespread adoption of parental control tools. However, in Chile, the legal framework that requires ISPs to offer such solutions does not establish minimum standards for the functionality or effectiveness of these solutions. This study presents a comprehensive technical and functional evaluation of mobile applications and Protective DNS (PDNS) filtering services available within the Chilean context. The most downloaded Android applications claiming to have parental control capabilities were selected. They were evaluated through practical tests on 1,427 categorized websites, on various versions of Android, including rooted and non-rooted devices. Assessing the detection of rooted devices, evasion resistance, among others. The evaluation considered ten key parental control functionalities, URL and IP filter accuracy, resistance to evasion techniques, and a novel Functionality Index (FI), designed to enable standardized and objective comparison of tools. The results reveal significant disparities: Although tools such as Google Family Link and Kaspersky demonstrate strong performance even under adverse conditions, others, despite their popularity or endorsement by Chilean ISPs, fail to provide basic protections. For the same set of websites, access to them was verified through PDNS services that had filters for adult and gambling categories. The results obtained show inconsistent accuracy, with high rates of false positives in legitimate categories and low effectiveness in filtering adult content. These findings highlight the need for standardized evaluation mechanisms and greater oversight to ensure effective digital protection for C&A.
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ISSN:2169-3536
2169-3536
DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3625851