The Lightspeed Filter Advantage on Apple Devices

Lightspeed Filter gives school districts flexibility and control to protect students from millions of harmful websites, images, and videos with a multi-layered approach: device, cloud, and network. Whether it’s school-managed devices, BYOD, or IoT, promote learning and exploration – on and off the network – while meeting regulations and maintaining user privacy.

What Sets Lightspeed Filter Apart on Mac and iOS Devices?

1. Agents are Apple’s preferred filtering method

Apple’s system extensions for content management require on-device software to ensure smooth filtering capabilities. With 25 years of experience, Lightspeed Systems leverages these tools for unparalleled scalability and performance, avoiding the limitations of remote filtering via VPN or proxy.

2. More visibility, less work

Lightspeed Filter offers on-device SSL decryption for all traffic with full URL reporting on Mac. It provides district, school, and user-focused dashboards, offering instant visibility into all student and staff on-device usage, including top websites, apps, blocks, and searches. Unknowns are blocked by default and reported immediately.

3. More secure and harder to bypass

It’s harder to uninstall an agent or prevent it from becoming inactive. If the cloud fails, on-device agents are still filtering the device.

4. Increased performance and reliability

Lightspeed SmartAgent patented technology offers the fastest possible performance in content filtering across platforms. By shifting the burden of filtering decisions to the device itself, latency is minimized, and bandwidth is unconstrained due to a distributed load scaling across devices. Lightspeed’s on-device software leverages caching to reduce remote requests and significantly boost performance.

5. Superior YouTube Controls beyond restricted mode

Restricted mode, driven by user settings, can misclassify harmful videos as safe for students. Our proprietary SmartPlay technology ensures that only educational videos are displayed, while blocking thumbnails, comments, and more. It also provides detailed visibility into specific videos or channels being watched.

6. Easy and fast troubleshooting

Lightspeed Filter is the only cloud-based solution in the market that provides a live user web activity feed for all of your MacOS devices.

7. More control over AI tools

Get visibility into what AI apps are being used in your district and granularly manage AI usage with three categories pre-seeded with over 3,000 AI websites.