Add an API for restricting content

[danirabbit]

Since OARS data is a thing, we should add an API of some kind so that we can tie AppCenter into Parental Controls and allow admins to blacklist apps based on that OARS data

[sycarion]

I work for a larger school district in the US. One of the barriers to adopting Elementary OS in schools is the lack of an ability to restrict apps from the AppCenter. For example, Pho for 4chan is not considered appropriate for students, but many of the other apps are great for many educational applications.

I do not know Vala, but I would like to help with any effort to set up Parental Controls.

[cassidyjames]

@sycarion I'm planning to attend a Parental Controls Hackfest next week and will bring this up there! But yes, that's the exact sort of reasoning we'd want for restricting app installs from AppCenter. In the meantime, you can ensure your students are not administrator users, as installing apps from AppCenter requires administrator privileges.

[cassidyjames]

@danrabbit it sounds like this is planned to be implemented upstream with https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pwithnall/malcontent. I'm not super familiar with malcontent (it was written for Endless OS), but perhaps we should chat with @pwithnall about implementing it?

[pwithnall]

Hello. Ask me anything, and feel free to file issues upstream. While malcontent was originally written for Endless, there’s nothing Endless-specific about it. It requires accounts-service and GLib, and nothing else.

The upstream documentation is a bit slim at the moment, so please file issues where things are unclear, and I’ll try to improve things. It’s a fairly young project!

In summary, it allows storage of some parental controls settings per-user using the extensions support which accounts-service provides for it. It’s essentially a client library for the accounts-service D-Bus interface, with some helper code which glues GAppInfo to the application blacklist.

It provides support for determining whether an app is blacklisted for a given user, and support for retrieving the set of OARS ratings which should be used to filter what a given user sees.

I expect it will grow over time to store more per-user parental controls data, as required by the functionality we discussed in the parental controls hackfest.

[danirabbit]

malcontent is available these days and we are using it in parental controls already