My 3 year old daughter Lil (her blog nickname) recently started to game on our family PC. As a Microsoft mom, I’m proud she’s learning how to use a computer and has quickly become comfortable with controlling the PC at a basic level. Granted, she isn’t doing much other than going to Nick Jr.’s website (saved into our favorites in IE) to play Dora the Explorer, Backyardigans and Yo Gabba Gabba! games. Even though her online time is short, I want to ensure she stays safe, avoiding advertisements and websites not meant for her little eyes. I’m in the early stages of having to think about online parameters, house rules and talking with my kids about proper online behavior, but this is a good time to start asking questions about tools available and how to establish some proper online safety etiquette for our household.
As this is a big topic, I plan to write a few times on keeping your kids safe online over the next couple months. To kick things off, I wanted to share what I was able to do in my house very quickly to ensure my kids are protected, with just a few easy steps using Windows Live Family Safety. Note that Family Safety is the replacement for MSN Parental Controls which is no longer being updated. I’ve never had to monitor other accounts in my household and even though I knew the capabilities of Family Safety, I had never actually applied the product. What I discovered is that setting up parameters for my house was really easy, so I wanted to share how to do this and encourage other parents to use this product to help protect your children, which will help you breathe a little easier. And remember, Windows Live Family Safety, part of the Windows Live Essentials suite of products, is FREE! You can download the latest beta here.
What does Windows Live Family Safety do?
Examples of how I’m personally using Family Safety in my house:
How easy is this really? You’ll be amazed! Here are the simple to follow steps to get you started:
In an upcoming post, I will interview a program manager for Family Safety to go into further depth on things you should know about keeping you kids safe online, including how to get the most out of free tools available to you. If you have questions about Windows Live Family Safety, please post comments. I will be picking from the top questions to include in my upcoming interview. Follow me on Twitter @WinMommyLisa.
Thanks for sharing!
As I have no children of my own, I've never used this tool. In fact, it is the only tool of Windows Live Essentials that I don't use yet.
Now I'll open the Famlily Safety and try it out to see what I can do ;)
I don't have any children (yet) but it is nice to know these great tools will be there when I need them. I think people could use a little more education on family safety and parental controls in general.
Although our children are too young, we do have older nieces/nephews over and they often want to get on the internet. We have 3 computers that we can let them log on via guest account. Can I use Family Safety to control the Windows 7 Guest user account across all 3 computers?
@JohnCz: You can use Windows Live Family Safety to monitor guest accounts for your home PCs; however, functionality is limited. Since it’s not possible to turn on parental controls on guest accounts, features such as time restrictions, game restrictions and program restrictions will not work. The only functionality for guest accounts is for web filtering and activity reporting. Microsoft recommends that you set up standard accounts for specific users if you wish to use the full functionality in Family Safety. Enforcing username and passwords also limits the possibility that your children could bypass restrictions you set by logging into a guest account, since there’s no straightforward way to set up passwords for guest accounts.
Thanks for the update Lisa. I'll setup a standard user account for guests.
As good as Windows Live Family Safety may be, as with other computer-based 'Nanny' programs, it has a significant flaw - savvy kids can get past it with ease. I won't go into how that's possible here for obvious reasons, but it is.
The only secure and safe option is to create an online filter between your computer and the internet, something that OpenDNS is very good at. There are 2 options, changed DNS settings on individual computers, or how I do it, by changing Router/modem settings. Personally, I use the latter and make sure the router access password is something only I know, and the same for my OpenDNS account.
It's completely free and offers various filter levels and settings. Best of all, kids can't change or get around it.
http://www.opendns.com
I should add that i'm not affilliated to the company in any way, just a very satisfied user.
@arraknid, that is not granular enough...especially if you have multiple accounts. I may block Facebook for example for an 8 year but I don't want to block that for myself or a >16 year old. Windows Live Family Safety provides alot of granularity...down to contacts they communicate with (if you want). This is just a tool, doesn't replace parenting. As far as workarounds that you hint at, well I do recommend...
1. Computer BIOS should be password protected.
2. Computer BIOS should have other boot devices disabled so your children can't try to use boot media to load a OS/Web Browser that way.
3. Configure your router to only allow MAC Addresses of devices you approve to access your network.
4. If possible, secure location/access to your home router.
5. And if your child is a genius and intent on scheming you by swapping harddrives, well you can place tamper proof/security stickers on your computers that would at least leave a trace of their activities. But frankly, if they think to do that...it might be time to teach them programming.
Btw, I hope the Windows Live Family Safety team looks at ways to enable/extend parental controls on a Windows Phone 7 device.
@JohnCz
Unfortunately, none of the workarounds you mention are what I had in mind - actually, they are very uninformed and make very little sense. That's not meant to be rude, just to let you know that your basic computer knowledge is quite limited. Don't believe me? Maybe you should check out YouTube, which is where pretty well all system hacks are detailed in full - mostly by kids.
This one is just the tip of the iceberg and is available to all kids, either via their computer or through their peers.
www.youtube.com/watch
If you fully-understood the way DNS filtering works and how to apply it to your computers to cope with multiple users, you wouldn't be trying to use software like Windows Live Family Safety.
As I said previously, it won't stop savvy kids going where they want, when they want. And they won't even leave a history trail.
arraknid, even simple DNS level blocking that you suggest won't prevent some of those workarounds, ex. proxy sites. Maybe you should talk to OpenDNS and ask them to collaborate with Microsoft to come up with an even better solution. For me, WL Family Safety is good enough and easier to manage for each child.
Proxy sites?? OK, your computer knowledge is sadly lacking. On a scale of 10, that would come in at 1 or less.
Maybe your kids aren't of an age yet that will get you worrying about what they are up to online, and maybe WLFS suits your needs at the moment, but let me tell you this.
My nephew who's just 9 years old bet me that he could get online with any one of my machines within 5 minutes and that I could do anything I wanted to try to prevent him. I spent an hour setting up every barrier I could think of, and as an IT professional, I was very confident.
Guess what, it only took him 4 minutes and I would never have known he'd been there. He also had free access to all of my files! He told me he'd learned it at school, so go figure!!
The saving grace was that he was still unable to access the restricted sites as set by OpenDNS, simply because he couldn't change any router settings.
Good luck with WLFS, and don't ever think your machine is kid-proof. It isn't.
Proxy Sites? Being an IT professional, you may have some knowledge of how proxy servers work. If not, look it up. OpenDNS ip filtering alone is not good enough. The funny thing @arraknid, we've been using OpenDNS for our home network for over a year. But Windows Live Family Saftey provides the granular control I seek.
Family Safety is a very good tool to keep an eye on your kids internet activities and control the times allowed online. The only thing it's missing is time limits. Would be great to allow for set times like, 1hr a day or something like that. Of course, nothing works quite like walking over and shutting the computer off