Microsoft announced this week that their soon-to-be-released Windows 8 operating system will have an advanced system and set of tools that will make it easier for parents to monitor their children's computer and online activity. Phil Sohn, Microsoft's senior program manager for family safety, highlighted numerous features for parental security control in a new blog posted Monday on MSDN blogs, from the initial addition of new personal accounts to a computer to weekly activity report.
Windows 8's parental control system will monitor what children are viewing, no matter what computer they are on. All that is required for the parent is to set up a user account for each child, after which a prompt shows up, stating "Is this a child's account? Turn on Family Safety to get reports of their PC use." According to Sohn's report, there won't be any extra web filtering or software additions required to monitor a child's computer usage; rather, after the user account for the child is set up, the parent or guardian will "receive a welcome email followed by weekly email reports summarizing" the children's online and computer activities. The weekly reports will display what websites children frequent the most, their latest web searches, how many hours they were online throughout the week, and what games and apps they used on their computer.
"We expect you'll find activity reports a great tool for teaching your kids about responsible computer use," Sohn said in the report. "Of course, you can also easily add restrictions by just clicking a link in the activity report. With the simplicity of activity reports, we believe more parents will adopt Family Safety, resulting in a safer computing environment for children."
For more advanced set of controls, parents can customize restrictions on their children via links in the weekly activity report, or through familysafety.microsoft.com, said Sohn. Additional controls include the level of web filtering on a children's account, where they could only allow for basic online communication (social networking, web chats and email) to letting them viewing websites that the parent or guardian has added to the "Allow" list. Time allotments for computer usage, a strict safesearch for online search engines, and game restriction customization is also available.
Windows 8 is rumored for release sometime later this year, and will be available in two formats: one for PCs, laptops, and tablets powered by x86 chips from AMD and Intel; and Windows RT solely for tablets that use ARM-based processors.
