Screen Time blocks Google websites because YouTube is restricted

Question

I'm using Screen Time's feature to block a website:

System Preferences -> Screen Time -> Content & Privacy -> Limit Adult Websites -> Customise... -> Restricted -> https://youtube.com/

Funny thing is, when I try to visit google.com or any of its subdomains (drive.google.com, calendar.google.com), I get this:

I looked at the Network tab, but there I only see requests to the google.com domain, but no requests to youtube.com. And what's even funnier is that when I visit youtube.com by entering it in the address bar of the browser, it loads without any problems. Do you have any idea why Screen Time behaves like this and how to fix it?

Answer 1

Your problem is that Google, as part of its single sign-on (SSO) process, also logs you into YouTube. For most of the Google applications, it can set cookies that are valid on *.google.com, but for YouTube, it redirects you to https://accounts.youtube.com/accounts/SetSID with a sign-on token; you can see this URL briefly flash up when you log in.

It's this redirect that's tripping up your filter. As described in other answers, you can restrict your filter to www.youtube.com, or you might be able to explicitly whitelist accounts.youtube.com.

Answer 2

Yes. The idea is to show you how a site embeds another so screen time appears to be working as intended.

Fix this by white listing the sites Google embeds in the sites you need to ask them to change how they construct their web sites. Or choose a different search provider. (Or don’t use Google sites in general).

This is highly confusing in practice since when the OS uses a search provider, you don’t always see the network requests. Try changing your search provider to duck duck go and disabling web previews in your browser app / system settings to get an easier set of variables to juggle while you sort out which places you want to block is how I pick these issues apart (in general).

The above picture is how I set up Safari for easier triage of blocked sites. You may need other settings if you use third party browsers or to understand if they respect the Safari settings.

Answer 3

Your filter is probably too broad: https://youtube.com blocks https://<anythinghere>.YouTube.com.

Try changing your Screen Time filter to specifically block https://www.youtube.com if your intention is to limit access to YouTube videos. IIRC there is an API or Analytics site that is visited to get some resources, etc.

I've just tried this and didn't receive any blocks from Screen Time.

This article also specifically adds www.youtube.com .

Alternatively, set the Time Limit for YouTube to 1 minute; this prevents the problem occurring and probably achieves your intention - stop watching YouTube videos.