Best website blocker for seniors
July 24, 2018 3:00 PM   Subscribe

I'm looking for recommendations to restrict website use for an Alzheimer's patient.

He has recently been losing his short-term memory more rapidly and has been more susceptible to being tricked into buying things from ads online. He likes to access certain websites, such as news and weather, but also falls prey to Publisher's Clearing House, trying to refinance his mortgage on a house that is paid off, etc. He will get angry if he notices his access is being restricted or he thinks his wife and family are limiting his activity - but it has to be. Is there a good fairly invisible site-blocker for this kind of use (mostly to do with buying things)?
posted by transient to Computers & Internet (6 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Build a raspberry pi with pi-hole and have it block the ads (it just removes them from pages), and if there's something that still comes up, put it in their blacklist?
posted by deezil at 3:39 PM on July 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


Best answer: I can't recommend a product off the top of my head, but you may need to whitelist only allowed sites rather than try to blacklist worrisome ones, as most products aren't able to categorize everything properly, so if you try to block all shopping sites or the like, he might be able to find some that aren't blocked.
posted by Candleman at 3:39 PM on July 24, 2018 [5 favorites]


I use Ghostery and AdBlock plugins to block quite a lot of this kind of stuff. The elements don't load, so they're just nice whitespace — rarely is it particularly obvious that something's missing. But this is not going to be a 100% solution... some Taboola/OutBrain stuff seems to inevitably slip through, and they specialize in the kind of clickbait that I can imagine catching your patient's attention.
posted by mumkin at 3:56 PM on July 24, 2018 [2 favorites]


Response by poster: Whitelisting may be the way to go. I think just ad blocking is not enough, but thank you and I would love to hear any more suggestions. (Ps sorry for my phrasing - he is not my patient; he is a relative)
posted by transient at 5:17 PM on July 24, 2018


You might consider editing his hosts file.
posted by aquamvidam at 8:18 PM on July 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Maybe additionally block most common payment processors (PayPal, Amazon, Stripe, etc) through the hosts file? And whitelist javascript only for the websites he regularly uses and that actually require it for displaying useful content with uMatrix, uBlock or NoScript. I don't think any payment processors work without it enabled.

If he only ever uses the one device a pi-hole is overkill, just manually edit the local hosts file.
posted by Bangaioh at 1:56 AM on July 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


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