Administrator user can't visit pages in Safari as they are not approved in Parental Controls

Question

I experience troubles regarding accessing some websites with Safari from the local network or outside.

The error says: Ooops! You can’t even see pages on this website. You can’t see the page “https://www.google.com/…” because it’s not on the approved list in parental controls. To add this website to your approved list, contact your network administrator. To return to the page you are looking at, click Go Back.

As you can see, the message says that parental control does not allow me to access this page. At first, I thought that the issue is that my network administrator does not allow accessing some pages but they told me that is not the case. Please note, I'm an admin on the system.

I checked online what the problem could be. They commonly say that parental controls could be set up or that /etc/hosts could blacklist some pages. I checked both, the parental controls are not enabled at all nor /etc/hosts contain anything that it should not.

The interested part is that I can access all the webpages without any issues through Google Chrome and Firefox.

Answer 1

The problem was related to the fact that Parental Controls were enabled for my account (A) under Users & Groups but I was unable to disable it since the checkbox was grey. Also, the Parental Controls in System preferences didn't shown that anything is set. Since the only user that can disable the checkbox is another admin I did the following:

1. Created a new admin account, lets call it B,
2. Logged in with the account B,
3. Disabled the option for the account A,
4. Logged out from the account B,
5. Deleted the account B.

Once I did that, everything that did not work started to work without any issues.

The affected stuff were:

1. Web pages I could not visit,
2. Siri deactivated w/o possibility to be activated
3. Dictation deactivated w/o possibility to be activated
4. Captive unable to load the login page on WiFi hotspots