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Troubleshooting → Device protection

SafeSearch or YouTube Restricted Mode is not locked on

Haven pins Google, YouTube, Bing and DuckDuckGo to their forced-safe addresses in the hosts file. If it is not sticking, either the setup section is missing or the browser is not asking the device.

What is probably going on

Most likely

The safe-search block never reached the hosts file, usually because the setup script was run without Administrator or root rights and stopped at that step.

Applies to: windows, mac
Check this firstLook in the hosts file for a section between "# BEGIN HAVEN SAFE SEARCH" and "# END HAVEN SAFE SEARCH". If it is not there, this is you. (Windows: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts. Mac: /etc/hosts.)
  1. Run the setup script again, accepting the Administrator prompt on Windows or entering your password on macOS.
  2. The script resolves each enforcement address at the moment it runs rather than using a saved number, so re-running it is also how you pick up an address that has changed.
Cause 2

The browser is using its own DNS again, so it never asks the device and never sees the hosts entry.

Check this firstSafeSearch is locked in one browser on this device and not in another.
  1. Turn off the browser's own Secure DNS setting — the steps are on the "still says not protected" page.
  2. Restart the browser.
Cause 3

It is a search engine Haven does not pin. Only Google, YouTube, Bing and DuckDuckGo have a forced-safe address to point at; the others have no such mechanism to use.

Check this firstThe search happened somewhere other than those four.
  1. Add a household rule for the search engine you want closed off.
  2. Set the four pinned ones as the browser default so they are what gets used.

What Haven cannot fix here

Stated plainly, because a product that hides its edges is how you end up trusting a surface nobody is covering.

A search engine with no forced-safe endpoint of its own.There is nothing to pin it to — this is a limit of what those companies publish, not a setting Haven has withheld. Blocking it as a household rule is the available answer.

Next door to this

Something got through that should not haveI followed the setup, but the check still says this device is not protected

Still stuck?

Two doors, and neither of them is a queue you never hear back from.

Report this — it did not work Have a technician do it with you Re-run the protection check My provider is the problem

Last checked 2026-08. Nothing on this page was written by a model — a made-up menu path is worse than no instruction at all, and this is the page somebody reads when they are already stuck.