Cannot enable parental controls for Guest if FileVault enabled

Question

Level 1

5 points

Cannot enable parental controls for Guest if FileVault enabled

FileVault is enabled on my Mac. When I subsequently enabled Find My Mac, the Guest User account was automatically enabled, as it is required for Find My Mac's theft recovery feature. When I accessed the Guest User in the Users & Groups Preferences panel, the "Enable parental controls" option for Guest User was greyed out. Thus, anyone with physical access to my computer, such as my kid, can gain unfettered access to the Internet without a password.

I did find a solution. I unchecked the "Allow guests to log in to this computer" box in the Preferences panel. This caused the "Enable parental controls" box to become checked (seems to be a bug). I then checked the "Allow guests to log in to this computer" box, which caused the "Enable parental controls" box to become unchecked. At this point, the "Enable parental controls" box was no longer greyed out, and I was able to check it.

System: Late 2014 Retina iMac with 3.5 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB memory, OS 10.10

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014), OS X Yosemite (10.10)

Posted on Nov 16, 2014 12:37 PM

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Answer 1

Nephi1

Level 1

12 points

Jan 25, 2017 11:05 PM in response to IA_Guy

I also discovered that with FileVault enabled, the Guest user couldn't have parental controls enabled properly. Other sites reiterated the bug.

We designed another solution. The Guest account is so a thief can log into something and the device can be found.

We decided to disable the standard Guest account and create a custom Guest Account. Named Guest1 or something other that Guest. Then Use Parental controls on that managed user to disallow all access to all sites except maybe one site ok for your kids to access. Our mock guest account has the password as "password" and the password hint as "password" Then any child can log into this mock guest account but find access limited to that singular site.

Hence the device is discoverable, but parental controls are enabled for the "guest" account.

Mac OS Sierra.

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Answer 2

IA_Guy Author

Level 1

5 points

Nov 16, 2014 12:50 PM in response to IA_Guy

Update: Although the method above appeared to enable parental controls, they do not work. When I log in as Guest (causing the computer to reboot into Safari-only mode), I am able to access a very well-known adult website (play*** dot com).

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