Windows Live Family Safety Settings, a free online service from Microsoft, will help parents track their children's online activities and block inappropriate Web sites. The service is part of a broader Microsoft effort, which also includes parental controls in Windows Vista, to ease fears about online safety. However, these free products could put pressure on partners that specialize in parental control products, such as Safebrowse.com (Safe Eyes) and Surf Control (CyberPatrol), as well as on security specialists, such as McAfee and Symantec, that include parental controls in their consumer security products.

Filtering and More

Announced in Mar. 2006, Windows Live Family Safety Settings will include the following features:

Web content filtering. Parents will be able to restrict young children to a list of approximately 100,000 Web sites that have been deemed appropriate for all ages. The service will also use Web crawling technology to continually update a database of sites in categories such as drugs, hate speech, and pornography. To give older children more freedom, parents will be able to choose whether they want to block access to a particular category of site, or merely display a warning. Parents will also be able to place their children into age groups and let the service determine appropriate levels of access.

In addition to checking sites against the database, Family Safety Settings will scan pages as they load, enabling it to block inappropriate search queries, for instance. Microsoft might also make additional filtering available for MSN sites, such as forbidding children from downloading songs with explicit lyrics from MSN Music.

Children will be able to send a request to their parents to unblock content, and parents will receive the requests through the online Family Safety Settings interface. An "over the shoulder" feature will allow parents to give permission on the spot.

Safe contact lists. Parents will be able to limit their children's communications on Windows Live Mail (the successor to Hotmail) and Windows Live Messenger (the successor to MSN Messenger) to people on a preapproved contacts list. Parents will also be able to limit viewership of their children's blogs on Windows Live Spaces to that same contact list.

The safe contact lists feature relies on Windows Live's forthcoming unified contact store (Windows Live Contacts), and therefore won't work with offline e-mail clients or third-party instant messaging clients. Likewise, it will not work with third-party Web mail services, although parents will be able to block their children from accessing such sites by selecting the "Web mail" category in the Web filtering feature.

Reporting. Parents will be able to view reports of Web sites their children visited or attempted to visit, including sites accessed by other applications (such as e-mail clients), and whom they communicated with.

Family Safety Settings will offer advice from the American Academy of Pediatrics on how to determine appropriate settings, how to confront children when they attempt to access blocked sites, and similar issues. Authentication will be handled by Microsoft's Passport service (which will eventually be renamed Windows Live ID). To help prevent children from bypassing the system, all users will have to log into Passport before accessing any Web site, and children will be prevented from signing up for new Passport accounts.

Competition, Overlap

Family Safety Settings will offer features that Microsoft already provides through MSN Premium, a combination of specialized client software and a subscription service that costs US$10 per month for most consumers and is bundled by some Internet service providers for their broadband customers. Unlike MSN Premium, Family Safety Settings will generate no revenue for Microsoft, since it will be free and will not display advertisements.

Microsoft is offering Family Safety Settings for free as part of a broader Microsoft effort to counteract negative perceptions about the Internet and computing, according to Alan Packer, product unit manager for the Technology Care and Safety business group. Although many third parties offer parental control software today, Packer notes that these products have relatively low adoption, and he cites problems such as over-blocking, the requirement for too much parental involvement, and the fact that none of them offer configuration advice from child-rearing experts.

Family Safety Settings overlaps with the new Parental Controls feature in Windows Vista. Both products will offer Web filtering (based on the same database) and activity reports, but Vista will include OS-level functions such as the ability to block access to games (based on their maturity rating) and other applications. Family Safety Settings, in turn, will offer some unique benefits, such as safe contact lists, online reports, and the ability for children to send unblock requests. Combined, these two products provide a powerful and free alternative to third-party parental control software and could make competition difficult.

Family Safety Settings also overlaps with the i:filter technology that Microsoft acquired from DynaComm in Feb. 2006 and plans to integrate into Internet Safety and Acceleration (ISA) Server, the company's corporate firewall and content caching product. Like Family Safety Settings, i:filter compares Web requests against a database of Web sites in various categories and can block access to those sites. However, the two products serve different needs: for example, corporations might want to block access to job search or stock trading sites and are more sensitive to over-blocking than parents are. Thus, there are currently no plans to merge these products or their underlying technologies.

Availability and Resources

Family Safety Settings is currently in closed beta, but it will become available in public beta in summer 2006 and be accessible from the Live.com beta page at ideas.live.com.

IE7, including its anti-phishing technology, is detailed in "IE7 Updates Security, Features" on page 3 of the Apr. 2006 Update.

Windows Vista's Parental Controls feature is discussed on the Internet Explorer team's blog at blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/03/01/541669.aspx.