Setup Help & FAQ
DNS blocking for smart TVs, IoT devices, and your whole home network.
Guides, answers, and direct support — everything you need to get the most out of Datante.
How-To
Step-by-step guides
Common tasks explained in plain language.
Point your router at Datante
Change one setting on your router and every device in your home is covered.
- 1Log into your router's admin panel (usually 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1).
- 2Find the DNS or WAN settings — look for 'Primary DNS' and 'Secondary DNS'.
- 3Enter your personal Datante resolver IP from the Setup page.
- 4Save and reboot the router.
- 5Return to the Setup page and run the DNS test to confirm it's active.
Switch your protection level
Go harder or lighter on blocking without changing a single router setting.
- 1Open your dashboard.
- 2Find the Protection level card and select a level — Essential, Standard, or Maximum.
- 3The change takes effect on every device in your home within seconds.
- 4Your router keeps pointing at the same address; only the filter rules change.
Pause filtering temporarily
Give yourself a break without touching your router.
- 1Open your dashboard.
- 2Click the Pause button in the control bar.
- 3Choose 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, or 4 hours.
- 4Filtering suspends immediately and resumes automatically when the timer expires — no action needed.
Compare blocked and allowed dashboard activity
Keep the headline, hourly chart, device families, and Collector Map on the same request measure.
- 1Open your dashboard. Blocked is selected by default.
- 2Choose Allowed to update the headline, hourly chart, device-family activity, category summary, and Collector Map together.
- 3Leave Show unrecognized activity off to focus on named and inferred families, or turn it on to include household activity Datante could not safely assign to a family.
- 4Use the time range selector (24h / 7d / 30d) to change the window. The 24-hour chart is hourly; longer ranges are grouped by calendar day.
The visible headline changes with the unrecognized-activity toggle so it matches the family activity represented in the charts.
Understand inferred device families
See useful household activity without turning DNS traffic into a hardware inventory.
- 1Open Dashboard → Devices or the device activity card.
- 2The dashboard starts with five named or inferred families ranked by the selected Blocked or Allowed measure. Choose Show all to reveal every family, including families with zero requests for the selected measure.
- 3Confirmed family means Datante observed a reviewed, hardware-family-specific endpoint.
- 4Likely family means at least two independent supporting endpoints agreed on the same concrete hardware family.
- 5Possible family means one explicitly reviewed hardware-family hint matched, but the signal is not strong enough to confirm.
- 6Historical inference can preserve an allowlisted hardware-family name when the current taxonomy only classifies its saved routes as that same family; a current evidence rule, operator override, or different-family classification replaces it.
- 7Older incomplete rows retain exact saved family totals. Missing domain detail is grouped as historical unattributed activity instead of being assigned to an invented domain. A family group is not an exact model, person, physical unit, or count of how many devices you own. Broad apps, shared cloud services, vendor sites, and ad networks stay in Other Unrecognized Devices.
Datante does not use MAC addresses, source-IP identity, router client lists, browser fingerprints, or hardware identifiers for these groups.
Check which sites are being blocked
See exactly which domains Datante stopped — and why.
- 1Open your dashboard and scroll down to the Top Blocked Domains section.
- 2Each row shows the domain, the number of blocked queries, and its device type and data type classification.
- 3Hover the colour chips for a plain-language description of the category.
- 4Use the time range selector (24h / 7d / 30d) to adjust the window.
Set up weekly digest emails
Get a weekly summary of what Datante blocked delivered to your inbox.
- 1Weekly digest emails are sent automatically every week once your router is connected.
- 2They show total blocks, week-over-week change, and the top offending domains.
- 3No setup needed — emails go to the address on your Datante account.
- 4To control whether the privacy monitoring section appears in the digest, go to Dashboard → Privacy → Email notifications and toggle 'Weekly privacy summary'.
Report a problem
Send a support snapshot directly from any page in the dashboard.
- 1Click the alert-circle icon (⚠) next to your email address in the top navigation bar.
- 2A modal opens showing exactly what will be sent: page path, browser info, and timestamp — no personal data.
- 3Click 'Send report'. You'll receive a reference number to quote if you follow up with support.
- 4If the automatic submission fails, a pre-filled email link appears so you can send the report manually.
The report never includes your email address, household ID, DNS query history, or browsing data.
Undo a policy or pause change
Reverse a blocking level change or pause within 30 seconds.
- 1After switching your protection level (Essential / Standard / Maximum) or pausing filtering, a toast notification appears at the bottom of the screen.
- 2Click 'Undo' within 30 seconds to reverse the change.
- 3Clicking Undo twice is safe — the action is applied only once.
- 4After 30 seconds the toast disappears and the change is permanent (you can still switch manually).
Datante checks its DNS network provider before starting setup. When the provider confirms maintenance, setup pauses before making any changes so you do not run into a failed configuration. You can leave the page open, use Check again, or request one recovery email at your account address and close the page. You can cancel that request from the maintenance screen before it sends. Your normal setup page returns as soon as the provider reports that service is available.
Datante works at the DNS layer — the address book your router uses to translate domain names into IP addresses. When your router points its DNS at us, every lookup that comes from a tracking, advertising, or surveillance domain gets blocked before it ever reaches your device. Every phone, TV, speaker, and laptop behind that router is covered with zero software to install.
No. Essential and Standard blocking leave streaming content delivery completely untouched — only the ad-serving and tracking layers are filtered. Maximum blocking is more aggressive and may interrupt a small number of ad-supported free services (like Pluto TV's free live tier). If something breaks, use the Pause button on your dashboard to suspend filtering for 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, or 4 hours.
Essential blocks trackers and data collection only — best compatibility with smart home devices. Standard adds ad blocking across all your devices and is the right choice for most households. Maximum adds malware blocking, safe search on YouTube and Google, and stronger ad filtering — a small number of streaming apps may occasionally need the Pause button. You can switch instantly from the dashboard at any time.
The setup page includes a DNS resolver test — it confirms your router is sending queries through Datante. Once that passes, the dashboard shows live blocking counts. Within minutes of pointing your router's DNS at us you should see your first blocked domains appear.
Device check sends safe requests from your browser to domains that your current protection settings are expected to block. If Datante answers normally but your current profile allows all of those test domains, the browser has no block signal to measure. That does not mean the device is bypassing Datante; it means this check cannot confirm protection at the current settings. Review your protection settings and try again, or use a browser without an ad-block extension when checking.
Yes — the Pause button on the dashboard suspends filtering for 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, or 4 hours and resumes automatically. You don't need to change any router settings. It's there for situations like a specific app complaining, or giving a guest temporary unrestricted access.
Datante names a device only when its DNS domain pattern is specific enough to do so confidently. Phones, laptops, browsers, and apps often use shared cloud or operating-system domains that cannot be safely attributed to one device, so that activity appears in one Other Unrecognized Devices group. It is still protected. This is intentional: Datante does not collect MAC addresses, hardware IDs, browser fingerprints, or a per-person device inventory just to force a label.
Some routers and ISP-provided gateways lock the DNS field. Workarounds include setting DNS at the DHCP level if your router exposes it, using a DNS-capable mesh node as the upstream, or switching the DNS on individual devices. Email us at support@datante.com and we'll find the right path for your specific hardware.
Connect your household router first, then open Network & Device Setup and select Android Device or Chromium Based Browser (Chrome, Edge). Android 9 and newer uses the DNS-over-TLS hostname through the system Private DNS setting. Supported Chrome and Edge browsers use the DNS-over-HTTPS URL through their secure DNS setting. Repeat the displayed steps on each device or supported browser you want to protect.
These carriers use Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT) and some intercept or override DNS traffic entirely. Datante detects known CGNAT providers during setup and shows a callout. Custom DNS can still work on many of them — contact support and we'll walk through the options for your specific carrier.
Automatically — every time you open the dashboard the current view refreshes from your DNS resolver, while a saved summary appears immediately. You can also click the Refresh button to force an immediate re-pull. The 24-hour view gives hourly resolution; 7-day and 30-day views aggregate by calendar day. Blocked or Allowed, All or Home or Away, and Show unrecognized activity apply to the headline, chart, device families, and Collector Map together. All is the default and also includes activity whose network could not be determined. Older saved summaries may label the hourly allowed distribution as estimated while preserving the exact visible total. If a refresh cannot finish, the dashboard says so and keeps showing your last saved summary until the next successful update.
Some connected devices query distinctive services used only by a particular family of smart-home gear. Datante matches those patterns against a reviewed fingerprint library. Confirmed, likely, possible, historical, and allowed-only families remain visible in the device-family chart, but each group describes DNS activity from a family—not an exact model, individual unit, owner, or physical-device count. For this household, otherwise unrecognized activity received through its DoH or DoT endpoint is grouped as Personal Device in both Home and Away views. Home matches the public network saved during router setup; Away means Control D observed a different public network, not that Datante knows a device's precise location. General vendor sites, shared cloud services, apps, and ad networks using other DNS paths stay in Other Unrecognized Devices. That group is hidden by default and appears when you turn on Show unrecognized activity.
Subscriptions renew automatically. If a payment fails, filtering continues for a short grace period before the account is paused. You can manage billing, update your card, or cancel any time through the Billing portal on your dashboard.
Yes — the optional Datante Remote desktop extension puts the same pause controls, custom allow/block rules, and personal-device DNS endpoints as the phone remote in your browser toolbar. Download the ZIP from Dashboard → Privacy → Desktop extension and load it via chrome://extensions (enable Developer mode, then Load unpacked). It uses your existing Datante sign-in — if you're logged in to datante.com in that browser, it works with no pairing codes. You can pause the whole home for 5, 15, 30, or 60 minutes, pause until you turn protection back on, and resume with one click. The extension has no analytics of its own — it cannot see your tabs, history, or page content. The only analytics event related to the extension is a server-side download event fired when you click the ZIP download button in your dashboard.
Datante collects a small set of server-side product events to measure service reliability and understand how features are used. These events are never sent from your browser — they are fired server-side by Datante's own infrastructure, so browser ad-blockers and DNS filtering cannot intercept them. Events collected include: page views on public pages (anonymous session ID only), blocking level changes, filtering pause/resume, subscription activation, and extension ZIP downloads. Events never include your DNS query history, browsing history, URL query-string parameters, IP address, search queries, AI prompts, passwords, or any device-level data. If you opt out of activity recording under Privacy settings, no events are sent at all. Operator accounts are excluded from tracking automatically. See the full list of collected and never-collected fields on our Privacy page.
Events collected: page_view (anonymous, path only — no query strings), preset_changed (from/to preset names), filtering_paused, filtering_resumed, subscription_activated, extension_downloaded. What is NEVER collected in any event: DNS query history or blocked-domain lists, browsing history or previously visited URLs, URL query-string parameters, page content or DOM snapshots, search queries, AI prompts or responses, session tokens or API keys, IndexedDB or localStorage contents, household ID or resolver IP. To opt out entirely, go to Dashboard → Account → Privacy and enable 'Disable activity recording'.
Still stuck? We're one message away.
Real human support by email — no tickets, no queues. We typically respond within a few hours.
Email supportCurious what's new? See the full changelog.