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Windows Live Family Safety
Windows Live Family Safety supplements Windows' built-in parental controls. It's designed to help you monitor your children's Internet activity; to function it must be installed separately on each of the computers that your children use.
To use Family Safety, you must first create separate user accounts for each of your children. When logged in, you can then create separate settings for each child.
Key to the operation of Family Safety is a robust content filtering function. You can opt for Strict, Basic, or Custom filtering (based on criteria you select). You can also enter specific websites that you want blocked or allowed.
Family Safety can also be used to determine who your children can and cannot contact over the Internet. You can configure Family Safety to allow or block access to any specific person via Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Hotmail, or Windows Live Spaces.
And here's the really neat thing about Windows Live Family Safety. You can set up the program and configure individual settings from any computer, even if you're not at home, using the Family Safety website, shown in Figure 2. In fact, this is where you do all the program configuration; just log on using your Windows Live ID and password, and you have access to all the program's settings and reports.
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Figure 2 Monitoring Windows Live Family Safety from the Web
Speaking of reports, Family Safety provides detailed activity reports for each of your children. These reports show you the websites each child visited (or tried to visit), what programs they used, as well as how much time they spent using the computer.