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Windows Vista Web Restrictions
It is our recommendation that you download Family Safety for XP, Vista, and Windows 7, even though Windows Vista has web restriction features included. Under Vista you can determine what sites your child can visit and what they are allowed to download. You can configure parameters and let the computer control the content or you can provide allowed and/or blocked sites. It is usually easier to configure "allowed" sites for your children (perhaps an online encyclopedia site, a news site, other educational sites or hobby sites, and so forth). However, the Family Safety option allows you to manage the requests of your children from any location as well as monitor their activity regardless of where you are located. With Windows Vista Parental Control, that isn’t the case. You have to physically access the machine to check and manage your child accounts.
Going forward, we will use a Windows XP system for figures so you can see that you can really use this feature with both. With both Windows XP and Windows 7, if you want to enable Family Safety features, you should create Standard User accounts for each child. Then go to the http://download.live.com site and download the Essentials package. You can pick which programs you want to install of the suite, or you can just install Family Safety.
When you first open Family Safety, it asks you to set up Family Safety. You need a (free) Windows Live ID to accomplish this. Figure 2 shows a Sign Up link at the bottom; click this if you need a Windows Live ID. Type your ID and password to use your Live ID account for Family Safety (as well as for other products you might have installed from Windows Live Essentials). The Live ID username just needs to be a valid email address.
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Having a Live ID is how this product works. So, once you have that ID, you can log-in to the Family Safety Filter. Choose the accounts you want to monitor and click Save (Figure 3). You might be asked to provide a password for the Child account to prevent your children from bypassing security features. You will then see the basic settings for the account (Figure 4).
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To customize your settings, go to the Family Safety site (Figure 5). If you click the Edit Settings link under your Child family member, you can configure the following: Web Filtering, Activity Reporting, Contact Management, and Requests (Figure 6). If your child is at home and you're at work, yet they need to visit a site they don’t have access to, you can use Requests to grant them permission to visit the site. Simply connect from work to grant them access to the site.
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One you have the settings configured, you can log out and have your child log in. They should see the Family Safety Filter icon in their notification area. When they attempt to access a page that they don't have access to, a This Page is Blocked notification appears (Figure 7). To request permission, your child can click the Email Your Request button or simply ask you in person.
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One of the nice things about the Activity logging feature is that it shows you any blocked sites, so you know if your child has tried to access inappropriate content (Figure 8). Obviously, your child will only ask you to allow access to approved sites. If a site isn’t approved and their attempt to access it isblocked, they probably think you will never know they tried to access it. But that isn’t true—thanks to Activity Reporting, you'll know they tried to access it. Sometimes just explaining that to a child ahead of time is the greatest protection.
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Keeping Pace with Technology
I often hear complaints from parents who say, "I just cannot know as much as my child about all this stuff." First off, you don’t have to know as much as they do. But you do have to try a little, at least in some of these areas. Second, if it really is too much of a task to learn some of this, you must call in an expert to help. Spend the money to pull in someone who can teach you what you need to know in order to check browsing history, turn on safety options, educate the children, and so forth.
There is no excuse for being lazy in this regard.