Windows 7 / Security and Privacy

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Extending Parental Controls with Windows Live Family Safety

Windows Live Family Safety is a cloud-based service that offers parental controls to Windows XP and extends the parental controls that are native to Windows 7 with a variety of Web, e-mail, and instant messaging protections aimed at keeping your children safe online. As such, it's best used on PCs that are shared between parents and children. We'll take a look at each feature of Windows Live Family Safety in the following sections.

Tip Windows Live Family Safety is installed as part of Windows Live Essentials. If you do not yet have Windows Live Essentials, please install it now by visiting the suite's Web page at download.live.com.

If Family Safety is installed, you can access its functionality via the Parental Controls control panel or via the standalone Family Safety Filter application. The easiest way to find this application is to type family in Start Menu Search.

As a Windows Live service, you actually do most Family Safety features configuration from the Web. The Windows application shown above simply determines whether Family Safety is enabled on that computer and provides a little refresh button for manually getting the latest family controls from the Web site.

To access the Family Safety Web site, click the link "Go to the Family Safety website."

From this Web site, you need to create a Windows Live ID for each child you will be protecting and then associate those IDs with your own Windows Live ID. This is a bit onerous, but once you've got all that configured, you can get up and running with Family Safety's core functionality: Web filtering, activity reporting, and contact management.

Web Filtering

Using the Windows Live Family Safety Web filtering option, parents can configure which types of Web sites their children can visit using a number of content categories that are specified on a per-child basis.

You can choose which sites your children see using simple settings such as the following:

• Strict: Family Safety blocks all Web sites except for a list of child-friendly Web sites that Microsoft has created as well as whichever sites you've manually configured.
• Basic: Family Safety blocks adult content only.
• Custom: If you choose the Custom restriction level, you can determine exactly what kind of Web content you'd like to block. In Windows Vista, you could actually choose to block vast swathes of objectionable subject matter such as adult content, Web mail, social networking sites, anonymizer sites, and other types of sites. But that's not how it works in Family Safety. Now, you can only allow or block specific sites. If you're really worried about the Web, you can block all Web sites except those you explicitly allow.

Activity Reporting

When this feature is enabled, your children's Web- and Internet-related activity is recorded and presented to you periodically in report form. The reports include such things as Web sites visited, instant-message conversations, and e-mails received and sent. Compared to Windows Vista's activity reporting, however, Windows Live Family Safety lacks the ability to monitor webcam and audio usage, game play, file exchanges, SMS messages, media (audio, video, and recorded television) access and logon times.

Contact Management

Windows Live Family Safety's contact management feature enables you to explicitly control which contact-driven Windows Live services your children can use and which contacts they can communicate with. Specifically, you can control access to Windows Live Messenger (instant messaging), Windows Live Hotmail (Web-based e-mail), and Windows Live Spaces (blogging), and manage your children's contact list, removing and adding contacts as you see fit. Finally, if you wish, you can give your children the freedom to manage their own contacts, but retain the ability to check in from time to time and intervene when necessary.

Remember Note that while Live Family Safety's contact management feature works well, it does nothing to block people from services outside of Windows Live from contacting your children. You will have to rely on the service's Web filtering functionality to keep away predators that might be lurking on MySpace or other non-Microsoft Web services.

Requests

There may come a time when your child wants to add a particular Web site to his or her Allow list or perhaps add a friend to the contact list. At that time, a window will pop up, and they will be given two ways to ask for your permission-in person or via e-mail.

Clicking "Ask in person" will simply ask the child to call you over to sign in and authorize the transaction by providing your administrative password. Clicking "E-mail your request," however, will do two things. First, an e-mail is generated and sent to your account. This e-mail simply states your child is trying to do something that requires your permission and that you should visit the Family Safety Web site (http://fss.live.com) to approve or deny this request. Second, a request is added to the Requests page on that site. This page will identify the Web page or contact your child wishes to add and when the action was requested. You can then OK-or deny-the request.

Requests will sit in queue for 30 days. If a request expires, it is automatically denied and removed from the queue.