Windows Live Family Safety

Here’s an example involving how the Family Safety filter and the browsing you may do online that is sometimes a sticking point for new users. As you know, once you’ve installed the Family Safety filter(*), you’ll need to sign in as a member of the family in order to start browsing online. For this example, the family has the following settings:

Parent: All websites allowed, no blocked sites

Child: Small list of allowed websites, rest of the Internet is blocked

If you’ve signed in as the parent, all browsing will be available to you. Most Windows Live sites including Family Safety have a “sign in” link in the upper right corner. You may have signed in to the Family Safety filter as the parent, but now that the Internet is available to you, you can sign in to any Windows Live (or other) website as yourself, or someone else, or even your child. The Internet is available to you fully, there is no restriction on who or how you sign in to a particular website.

Question: Given that you’re signed in as the parent with the Family Safety filter, what websites will be allowed for you if you sign in to a Windows Live website as your child?

Answer: You’ll still be getting the parent’s settings.

As a new user, if your expectation was that signing in to the child via a Windows Live website changes who you’re signed in as with the filter, it will appear that the Family Safety filter is not working. In actuality, the Family Safety filter is working, just with the more permissive parent settings.

As a note of assurance, it can be hard to keep track on the web exactly what information gets beamed down to your local machine, and what information stays up there. It can be hard to tell the difference between using a program and changing settings on a website, especially if you’ve been working with a program such as Family Safety that uses the website to CONTROL the functionality of the filter which is local to your machine. Please explore how this works and let us know your thoughts on signing in (both on the web and with the filter) in the comments.

(*) The Family Safety filter is a program that you download and install when you choose to install Family Safety on your computer.

- Elizabeth Grigg, Program Manager, Family Safety

Over here on the Family Safety team, we hear a lot about accounts. There are many different types. In general, when someone is talking about an online “account” they mean a username and password pair that gives them personalized access to products and services. Probably the oldest kind of account online is an e-mail account. Your username is your e-mail address (or just the front part, minus the @domain stuff), and your password is something you picked out and hopefully you change it regularly. To get your e-mail, you need to enter these two pieces of information into the system. Accounts are used for purchases, chat, and generally membership in anything online. One person can have many accounts, and it’s likely this is not uncommon even in children.

Looking at Family Safety software at Microsoft, there are still a lot of different accounts involved. If you’re using Windows Vista parental controls, you apply those controls to a Windows account that your child uses. Some household computers may not have that additional Windows account until the administrator realizes they want to apply parental controls. One thing that Windows does well is to provide an option to create a new Windows account while you’re in the process of setting up parental controls. It would be a pain to have to navigate somewhere else to do this and then come back to setting up parental controls. Windows accounts can be limited accounts or administrator accounts. Administrators can do things like install and uninstall software. You can see how if you’re creating a new Windows account for your child, you’d want that account to be Limited. All Windows accounts can have passwords, but not all do. If your machine has an administrator account without a password, it’s the same as elevating the privileges of all the limited accounts on your machine.

Other Family Safety services from Microsoft are based on online ids called a Passport or Windows Live Account. This is also referred to as a “Windows Live ID.” Of course you have to sign on to your computer somehow. You’ll still use a Windows account for that. After you’ve done that, to access your online services with Windows Live such as Hotmail and Messenger, you’ll use a Windows Live ID. It’s a bit confusing because the word Windows is used in both places. The word to focus on is Live… the reason why this term is helpful is it sounds like something that is alive, that can move around from place to place. A Windows Live ID is useful from any machine with online access, whereas if you create a Windows account, it’s local so it’s only applicable to that one machine.

In usability tests we sometimes see users get hung up on prompts for a Windows Live ID, especially if they have just been through a setup process with their Windows account. Say you create a Windows account called Mom. Then you install Family Safety software from Windows Live and are prompted to sign in. What do you sign in with, is it Mom again? One thing we can do a better job with is help people understand what we’re asking for every time they’re prompted to sign in. Key to doing this is to explain the difference between the different types of accounts. Similar to your Windows account, you can select your Windows Live account to remember your password, which also effectively lets anyone with access to your machine sign in online as you. This does not sound important… after all, these people are invited into your home… but keep in mind for Family Safety, the account settings are maintained online. If you said “no” to a request from your child to view a website, that setting can be changed to “yes” if the settings see appropriate credentials.

Given this landscape, we’d like to ask users of Windows Live OneCare Family Safety how they use their accounts.

Specifically:

1) Do you have a separate Windows account for each family member, or do some still share even after installing Windows Live OneCare Family Safety?

2) Do all these Windows accounts have their own passwords?

3) Are you aware of the privileges between administrator and limited accounts, and do the children end up with limited accounts?

4) If your children are too young to type a password, what choices have you made to work around that?

5) When prompted for a Windows Live ID, do you know what you’re being asked for?

6) Do you know if your child has membership accounts online? (Hint: The Windows Live OneCare Family Safety activity report can provide you with a list of websites your child has visited).

7) Make up your own question and answer it here!

Thanks in advance for the feedback and for taking the time to contribute.

- Elizabeth Grigg, Program Manager, Family Safety

The good news is, the Family Safety team has been working hard on the next release. The bad news is, this has not left a lot of time for posting to this blog and we apologize for that. While we’re working on some new posts, we have the following suggestions:

· For individual support, please access https://support.live.com/

· We’ll keep comments open on this blog. We welcome comments as it can be a great way for individuals to share information with the entire community

· Suggestions for new blog posts are encouraged!

Best,

- The Family Safety Team

We have noticed an increase in users experiencing issues with Webkinz being blocked by Family Safety Settings.  The reason for this is that Webkinz does not use URLs for their websites but rather uses IP addresses. There are a few IP addresses for Webkinz on the kid’s safe sites list, but webkinz can change or expand the list at any time.

The best way to allow access to the Webkinz site is to check the exact IP address shown in the block message for Family Safety users that have IE 7 installed. This is the address that should be added to the "Allow" list.  If another change occurs on the Webkinz side, this new address should be added as well.  Unfortnately, there is no way for Microsoft to anticipate what IP addresses Webkinz will use, and allow them to eliminate this issue.

If you have any problems with allowing IP addresses, please feel free to seek help through our Support contact at http://support.live.com