Why does Safe Surfer say that it blocked an app that isn't installed on a device?
The Safe Surfer dashboard might report that an app (such as a social media service) was blocked on a device, even when the app isn't installed. This is normal, and doesn't necessarily mean that the device user tried to install and use the service that was reported as blocked. In short, this could be due to a shared post on a website unrelated to the service that was blocked.
A lot of social media services feature multiple ways of accessing content on their platform. This could be through the app itself, the official website, or embedded (shared) posts found throughout the Internet. Some websites also link to systems that interact with the social media platform in the background.
The primary way that Safe Surfer works is through a computer networking technology called DNS (Domain Name System). DNS could be thought of as the "telephone book" of the Internet. Most of the Internet relies on DNS to access websites and online content. When a device uses Safe Surfer, we take advantage of DNS to block websites and apps from being able to talk to their online servers before they're accessed in the first place. For example, if you block the Gambling category, we then block any requests to websites that we've marked as Gambling in our cloud database.
Why does this happen?
A lot of social media services feature multiple ways of accessing content on their platform. This could be through the app itself, the official website, or embedded (shared) posts found throughout the Internet. Some websites also link to systems that interact with the social media platform in the background.
The primary way that Safe Surfer works is through a computer networking technology called DNS (Domain Name System). DNS could be thought of as the "telephone book" of the Internet. Most of the Internet relies on DNS to access websites and online content. When a device uses Safe Surfer, we take advantage of DNS to block websites and apps from being able to talk to their online servers before they're accessed in the first place. For example, if you block the Gambling category, we then block any requests to websites that we've marked as Gambling in our cloud database.
Updated on: 09/11/2023
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