Parental Control Service Planned

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.