Review: CIRA Canadian Shield App

Best for: Any family with computers, tablets and smartphones

Tested on: A Google Pixel 9 Pro phone and a Macbook Air

Tested by: Erin Pepler, mom to a 13- and 15-year-old

Bottom line

I’d recommend installing the CIRA Canadian Shield app on your smartphone, tablet, family computer and/or laptop. It was comforting having the app quietly protect my devices from online threats while I went about my daily life, and it was super easy to install and use—plus, it’s free. I like that it’s a Canadian company with a 100% uptime guarantee, which means that it should function close to perfectly with zero downtime. I’m definitely going to install CIRA Canadian Shield on my teens’ laptops and suggest that my parents and in-laws download the app for their cyber protection.

Review

We live in an increasingly online world, and so do our children. Even if you have strict rules about screen time, chances are that as your kids age and become more independent, they’ll gain more digital freedom. Parents should talk to their kids often about online safety, specifically bullying, stranger danger, chatting and sharing images. However, it’s also important to discuss cybersecurity and common cyberthreats. This means teaching them about things like malware and spyware (short for malicious and spying software), which are designed to infiltrate personal computers and can put your data at risk of a security breach. None of us can monitor our kids all of the time, and even the savviest kids (and adults!) can accidentally click on the wrong link.

Unfortunately, digital threats are becoming more sophisticated and harmful, and Canadians of all ages are at risk for data breaches, scams and more. CIRA, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, is a not-for-profit organization that manages the .ca domain space, ensuring a secure online environment for individuals and organizations. To help Canadians protect themselves against cyberthreats, they developed CIRA Canadian Shield, a free, user-friendly app providing critical online protection, security and peace of mind. Here’s everything you need to know.

How the CIRA Canadian Shield app works

Domain Name System (DNS) is used to translate website URLs to machine-readable IP addresses, acting sort of like an old-school phone book in the sense that it matches names and numbers. When you type in a website name, a DNS request goes through the system before taking you to that website. Canadian Shield scans all DNS requests made to your device and instantly blocks any suspicious sites or real threats via its firewall, which acts like a barrier between untrusted sites and your computer. Canadian Shield is available in two formats: regular (called “protected”) and family, with the latter blocking websites that are inappropriate for kids while providing the same cybersecurity as the regular version.

The app runs seamlessly in the background while you use your devices, so it’s basically invisible until you check the dashboard. From there, you can see how many DNS requests have been scanned by the Canadian Shield firewall. You can also see if any requests were blocked. According to CIRA, the app executes an average of 382 million–plus blocks for all users each month, stopping inappropriate content, malware, botnets and phishing sites from infiltrating your devices.

How it functioned on two devices

I downloaded the free app on my phone first—a Google Pixel 9 Pro model that uses an Android operating system. It was very easy to find the app in the Google Play store and to download it. I could see that it started working right away as the number of scanned (and blocked) items was easily visible from the app’s dashboard. It was comforting to see it working in the background.

Practical note: I did have to disable Canadian Shield when I was driving because Android Auto couldn’t connect to my phone when the app was running. This prevented me from using Google Maps, voice-to-text, Spotify and other apps, so I quickly got in the habit of disabling Canadian Shield whenever I was behind the wheel, and switching it back on when not on the road. Apparently, this happens because Android Auto often struggles to connect when a VPN-style app is running in the background, which is what Canadian Shield uses to provide DNS protection. It’s a common Android limitation and not specific to this app, but if you use Apple CarPlay, you wouldn’t experience the same issue.

Next, I downloaded the app onto my laptop using the Chrome extension. I was interested to see if the app worked any differently on my laptop because I have a Macbook Air, which is a completely different operating system than my smartphone. Good news: It all ran smoothly and without issue on my Apple device, too. I could forget that it was running in the background, and I didn’t notice any change in the functioning of my laptop after installing the app. For the purposes of this review, I made a point to check the dashboard daily and saw requests were being made in the thousands, and the app was scanning them all for threats. It was definitely a good feeling to see CIRA Canadian Shield working away in the background. As a self-employed individual who relies on Google Docs, email, accounting software and other online programs to do my job, I will take all of the added security I can get.

As a parent, I was also eager to see how I could use the app to protect my kids, who are 13 and 15 years old and have internet-enabled devices of their own. After using the app on both devices for a week, I decided to test the adult content filter. I did this the old-fashioned way: by typing in the name of a popular pornographic website, first on my laptop and then on my smartphone. The site was blocked each time and I was left reassured that the app was working well.

Quality

The app worked perfectly on my Macbook using the Google Chrome extension, and was basically invisible, although I chose to add it to my toolbar so I’d remember to check it occasionally.

Ease of use

The app was simple to install on my phone and laptop, and using it was a breeze—you don’t have to be tech-savvy to navigate the dashboard. Turning the app on or off was very straightforward and took a matter of seconds.

If you are using the CIRA Canadian Shield browser extension on a shared family computer, a PIN code can be used to lock the extension on “family mode,” keeping kids from being able to turn it off.

Value

It’s free, so you really can’t beat the price!

Innovation

I was amazed at how many DNS requests the app was scanning every day—it was literally thousands, which added up to tens of thousands over the course of the week. It was genuinely reassuring that my phone and laptop had an extra layer of protection from a trusted source. I love that there’s also a family option, which blocks adult content as well as scams.

How to get CIRA Canadian Shield

Visit https://www.cira.ca/en/canadian-shield/ to download the appropriate extension for your laptop. You can also download the free CIRA Canadian Shield app from Google Play or the App Store.