Those of you with families will, no doubt, want to know that your children are safe whilst they are browsing on-line. You might want to stop them from viewing certain sites. You might even want to stop them using their computer outside of prescribed times.
Up until now, you’ve either had to watch over them yourselves or buy hard to install parental control software that didn’t do everything you wanted. Well that’s all changed – Symantec, producers of the excellent Norton Internet Security, have released Norton Online Family. What’s more, it’s completely free of charge.
Norton Online Family is a free application from Symantec, producers of some of the best anti-virus and Internet security software in the world – and it works very well. We’ve been testing it for some months and have found it to do everything we want of parental control software.
Control panel
Upon signing in you are presented with a control panel from where you can view all the warnings that have been issued to your children, your child’s activities whilst they were on-line and the settings for each child (each child has their own account).
The settings are the most important since this controls what your children can and can’t do once they’re logged on.
Web settings
Here you can specify the types of web site that your children can view. So, for example, you can stop them viewing sites about alchohol, drugs, computer hacking, hate, shopping, social networking, as well as the ubiquitous sexual sites. You can choose to block outright these sites, or give your child a warning (in which case breaches of the rules will be reported in the alerts section of the control panel), or just monitor to track what they’re visiting.
Search
The search settings filter out adult orientated content from appearing in search engine listings generated by the most popular search engines (Google, Ask, YouTube, Yahoo!, Bing and Blinkx).
Instant Messaging
You can have Norton Online Family block your children from accessing Instant Messaging software, or allow it but keep a log of the conversations held for review by you at a later date.
Social Networking
If you want to know what social networks your child is a member of, Norton Online Family will monitor access and the login names used to access them.
Time
A real bonus if your children keep sneaking on to the computer when they should be in bed, this utility allows you to specify when your children can log on and when they have to log off the computer. Access outside these times is dealt with my Norton Online Family automatically logging them off. You can specify different times for each day of the week in one hour, or half-hour blocks.
Better still you can even allocate a time quota. So you can allow them to log in any time between 4:00 and 7:30, but restrict them to one hour’s access within this time frame. This is great if you don’t want your children glued to the screen for every waking hour.
Notify
With all this monitoring being done for you, it’s nice to know what’s going on – but we often forgot to log in to the control panel and check. Norton Online Family will email us important breaches of the rules.
Requirements
We’ve got Norton Online Family working on Windows XP and Vista computers, so see no reason why it won’t work on Windows 7 too. There is also a version for Apple Macintosh computers too.
The only thing you should do on these computers is set up a user account for each child, and if your children have access to more than one computer in the house (as we do) it works quite happily in these environments too.
Web safety training
Keeping your children safe on the Internet can be a minefield if you’re not ‘in’ to computers. We offer courses which explain how to do this efficiently and we’ll even install the software for you and show you how to operate it. For further details please do not hesitate to contact us, or visit or web site.
Conclusion
We thoroughly recommend Norton Online Family as a great free piece of software, from a leading Internet security company.
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