Windows 8 family safety - I wish someone had told me

Or the story of how I finally got to the bottom of why parental controls were not working!

Ok, here's the deal. I have two wonderful sons. Son 1 has been running quite happily on a windows 7 laptop ever since he started senior school 3 years ago. We bought him the laptop to do his homework, though I think it's used more for facebook and youtube if truth be told.

Anyway, now Son 2 is about to go to senior school in September, and knowing that his big brother received a new laptop is eagerly awaiting the arrival of his. He knows I'm using it right now, and is busting a gut to get at it - but I won't let him have it until i'm sure it's working ok and (above all) that family safety is switched on!

the new laptop is an acer aspire V5-572p - a basic 6GB Core i3 system with the big plus point of a touch screen - which is a real boon given the great difficulty you can have trying to get a system running windows 7 these days.

As a relative newcomer to Windows 8, I've spent a good few hours trying to work out how everything works. Even closing apps is an absolute nightmare - everything seems a lot more difficult than it needs to be! Anyway, I digress. The one thing I thought would be a simple thing to achieve was to configure the family safety features, and prevent (or at least delay) my youngest from an untimely education of an entirely different kind than the type the laptop is intended to assist with. Things were not as simple as I expected.

Firstly, I set up the accounts - the 'user' account (first windows 8 account) for me and a standard account for him - both linked to Windows Live so that we could take advantage of all the cloud storage functionality that Windows 8 touts. I then went into the control panel (which took some finding) and into the family safety settings.

I happily set up the hours he was allowed to use the system (though not the total hours he was allowed to use it because that would be unfair when we can't do the same for his big bro -- you really need to backport that functionality Microsoft!) And I also enabled website filtering and activity reporting (because no blacklist is 100%!). I set him at 'online communication' level to block out the real nasties but still allow him to do all the social networking normally associated with teenagers.

Then I logged onto his account, deleted all the ubiquitous 'bloatware' that was clogging the start screen, and went into IE to test it was working. Selecting something not too controversial (after all, the wife IS lying on the bed next to me) I went to www.playboy.com.

BANG! - straight into the site. No blocking, no warning, no checking of any kind. Of course, I must have made some sort error. I went back to the family safety configuration control panel app..... Nope. Everything looks ok. Took the detour onto the family safety configuration website - nope everything looks ok there too! - although I did note that because i'd used his live ID, it had set him up a new account completely separate to the windows live family safety configuration he already had for our family computer.|

So, here was the proof. I really am an old fuddy duddy - playboy.com is obviously too mild a site these days to be considered 'porn' and isn't getting blocked. I went back into my son's new account, opened up google and typed in the most obvious word 'Porn' and selected one of the first few entries on the screen - That ought to do it.

BANG! - and that's a big bang if ever there was one - straight into the home page of a full-on porn site with video clips & everything!. Fortunately the wife is currently in the kitchen making tea, so I quickly close the site and move on.

What's going on? Have Microsoft released a family safety package that just doesn't work? - I can't see that happening without it hitting prime time news so something fundamental is obviously wrong.

Google searches found a few people having similar problems, and no really satisfactory answers. Somebody suggested it was a clash with AVG - interesting. I haven't installed AVG - but I DO have more bloatware, a fully fledged 60 day trial of Mcafee installed by my hardware vendor for my 'convenience' - in the hope that i'll renew it when it expires.

It transpires that Mcafee has its own family safety package. Because of this it seems, it stops the default windows 8 "Family Safety" service and sets it to manual. For some strange reason, the family safety app does not capture this tiny config flaw and warn you about it - leading you into a false sense of security that everything is set up and working.

My resolution for now was to configure the parental controls within the Mcafee package - which seem to work quite well tbh. At least I did my google search for 'porn' again and got no results. Requests for www.playboy.com were similarly restricted!


Of course, in a few weeks i'll be removing the Mcafee package for one of my choosing - at which time I will set the Microsoft 'family safety' service to automatic and start it and check it's running correctly.

The problems here are multiple:

1) The Microsoft tools don't warn (as far as I can see) that the family safety settings you have set up are inoperative because the service is not started. - this could lead you to assume that everything is ok and your children are safe from a premature education when the truth is very far from this

2) The Mcafee tools do not block access to the Microsoft control panel app, or provide any form of warning to the user of the pre-configured laptop that the settings you are trying to configure have been disabled

3) From the google searching I did, i'm not the only one to have stumbled across this problem - though there's nothing comprehensive to fix it. A support article from either Microsoft or Mcafee (or better yet both) should be first page on a google search - allowing those who HAVE been careful enough to test their family safety settings are working to quickly find out why!

I hope this article stops others having to spend multiple hours troubleshooting an issue that really should not be an issue.


PS: If you're interested in family safety, I recently became aware that if you use the OPENDNS name servers and set yourself up an account with them (free) you can have another layer of blocking. This would make a good backstop to whatever other family safety package you're using. It seems to work quite well - and ALSO blocks all those other devices that family safety packages often miss - ipods/ipads, friend's computers, games consoles, tablets, mobile phones (when configured for wifi) ... check them out at opendns.com - full instructions there on how to set up your wifi router to enable this functionality