Now a days Internet is a part of life for everyone including kids but easy availability of adult contents on internet is a reason to worry for parents and school authorities. As we earlier talked about Kido’s browser for safe browsing, here is another solution from Microsoft Windows live team. They come up with “Family Safety” application which is helpful for parents or teachers to keep track of browsing, chatting and other activity done by each child.
Family Safety is a desktop application which needs to be downloaded and installed on the computer used by Kid. Now once the “Family Safety” got installed successfully on that PC then you can customize the settings for “Content Filtering” and chatting restrictions etc from the link provided by Windows Live.
How To Use Family Safety Provided By Windows Live
1. Download Windows Live Installer
2. Install Family Safety
3. Start Family Safety Program from Start Menu
4. Now follow below mentioned step by step guide to use Family Safety
Login To Family Safety with your Windows Live ID and Password. You will be treated as Parent of the child in Windows Live who can monitor the activity or customize the settings for the child.
Once you login to the Family Safety window, You will get the list of current users on the PC on which are working right now. If the child is going to use the same PC then create a standard account for him or her by clicking over the Account Creation option available on the top.
You can set the password for the account from Control Panel of the computer. Now child will have to login to the computer with the same account and password.
Once the account get created, you will be asked to move to familysafety.live.com to further customize the activity for the child. Since you created a standard account for the child on your computer, the default blocking activity is already started. Which means Web filtering is enabled, porn sites are blocked for the child, Activity Reporting is enabled and You can customize the Contact Management to restrict the child to chat with selected people. Below mentioned are the options available on “Family Safety Page” i.e. familysafety.live.com,
Family Safety Page Screenshot
Available Settings on Family Safety Page are Web Filtering, Activity Reporting, Contact Management and Requests. Each of them are detailed below,
Online Options Available on Family Safety
Web Filtering
You can add or remove websites to restrict the access for a child. If standard acount is created, then basic filtering is enabled and in that case porn or other adult material website will not open. You can go for the strict one and customize the access for other categories like Gaming, Casino, Dating etc. as well.
Activity Reporting
Get the activity details of the child in your Family Filtering window. You can go thru the activities made by your child on the computer. It will show you the web address viewed by the child or other activities made by him on the computer.
Contact Management
Restrict the child to chat with limited friends, family or people. On Internet, it is very common to receive a chat link from some adult site or dating site and that may become harmful for your child. So you can take control of people who can chat with your child safely.
Requests
If your child wants to access a site (may be some useful one) and you had blocked it at certain point of time then child can put a request to you to approve that link so that he can browse it again. This situation is true for contact management as well. So whenever he feels that he needs the access for certain site or people, he can put a request from his computer which will appear in the Request tab.
Blocked Page will appear for the child as below,
Benefits Of Using Family Safety
1. Restrict the child to use Internet safely
2. No Porn or other adult material accessibility
3. Monitor the activity on daily basis
4. Control the access on move. Login with Your Windows Live ID and control the access from anywhere or go thru the activity report.
5. Manage requests made by child
6. Focus on your job without worrying about children’s activity on Internet
7. Manage different IDs for different child and access their information from single window
If you are facing any trouble or having a doubt related to Family Safety, then drop your query in comment section of this post. We will try to reply you as early as possible.