Recently we decided to buy a Kindle Fire HD Kids edition for Isaiah. We realized that technology today is far more advanced than it was when we were growing up and rather than prevent our kids from enjoying this advancement we agreed to do our best to govern their exposure.
With that said for a company that advertised a tablet that was built for kids we felt this was a great option to encourage freedom with boundaries. After setting up the Kindle Fire we immediately started setting up the restrictions and reviewing Amazon's Parent Dashboard. To our surprise, we quickly realized that Amazon has made some very poor decisions in the content curation of suggested apps.
For example, we saw several apps that were promoting gender neutrality along with apps that were not suited for a kid between the ages of 3 and 5, which is what we set for Isaiah's age group.
Immediately we revoked Isaiah's permissions to use the Kindle and began investigating how to whitelist only apps that we allow. After several days of searching, even looking at Open Source Github projects to whitelist applications I determined that Amazon made a deliberate decision to not allow whitelisting, while they fully allowed blacklisting.
Whitelisting is the process of only including/allowing a list of apps, while blacklist allows you to go through a list and explicitly exclude items. Why is this important? The curated list that is displayed in the kids profile are handpicked and pushed to the Kindle at any point in time by teams at Amazon. We would be subjected to constantly checking that list and searching through tens of thousands of apps to explicitly exclude them.
To make matters worse the searching and blacklisting functionality is extremely poor. For example, when you attempt to bulk blacklist groups of applications Amazon only shows a few tens or hundreds at a time and does not allow you to blacklist the entire list of applications.
It became clear to me that Amazon has done a poor job at enabling parents to enforce restrictions against the content their kids are subjected to. I wouldn't even call the Parent Dashboard a tool, it is more like a push-over solution for a growing list of angry parents.
Out of the box, the Amazon Fire HD for Kids should not be marketed as a safe educational resource for children.
Taking matters into my own hands I immediately began searching for applications or ways that I could access the local database of the Amazon Kids app that is installed on the Kindle. Of course, this search yielded no results as the Kindle is a modified Android operating system and does not allow you to access the root file system.
Refusing to accept defeat I realized that I can block content and domains at the firewall /router level within our home and that is when I found AdGuard Home.
With AdGuard Home installed on a Raspberry Pi via Home Assistant we are now able to block access to content and domains from Amazon without having to install firewall and parental controls on every device in the house.
I hope this article is helpful for someone out there, if you are interested in instructions on how to set this up for your home please reach out.
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