Windows Live family safety is a Microsoft program developed to help filter content that may be inappropriate for children. To download WLFS (Window Live Family Safety), visit Microsoft’s download page and search for Windows Live Family Safety. If your computer has Windows Live Essentials you may already have WLFS. To check whether you have WLFS already installed, type “Windows Live Family Safety” in the start bar search.

To begin using Windows Live Family Safety, type “Windows Live Family Safety” in the start search bar. Click “Windows Live Family Safety” to start the program. To use WILF you must have a hotmail account. If you do not already have one, you can click the “Sign up” button at the bottom of the screen. Once you have a hotmail account, type your login credentials and press “Sign in”.

Once you have signed into your hotmail account, you will notice all the accounts you have on your computer.  Checkmark the box for “Monitor account” under the user you would like to monitor.

PLEASE NOTE:

You should have more than one account. You should see a user account under administrator and another under standard users. It is important to have your monitored account under a standard user. If you choose not to have the monitored account a standard user, it is only a matter of a few clicks to disable protection, regardless of any password.

WHY:

WILF uses a service called “Windows Live Family Safety Service” or “fsssvc”. This service can be disabled by any administrator. A standard user will not have access to disabling the service, thus the protection cannot be turned off.

If you have not set up a standard user account, you can click the “Create a new standard Windows account”. This will setup a new standard user for you to login to when you logoff.  Click “Next” when you have selected an account to monitor. WILF will ask you to select a family member to add the account under. More than likely you will want to choose the “Add (so and so)” option to add that accounts user name to the list of monitored persons. Or you have the option to lump everyone into a single group. When you have selected your option from the dropdown, click “Save”. The next window that pops up will show you an overview of what has just been set-up. You should see that “Web filtering” is enabled for adult sites and “Activity reporting” is on.

That is it for setting up a safety filter for the net.  When you want to see what a user is up to, you can view their activity reports by logging into fss.live.com and clicking “View activity report”. You will get a list of website that have been visited and at what time.

Another aspect of WILF is managing when users have permission to use the web. In Family Safety online, click a user. From there click “Time limits” and click the radial button for “Turn on time limits”. From the graph, you can decide when it is appropriate and inappropriate to be on the internet. For time that users should not be on, fill in the white space (Allowed) with blue (Blocked). Now, that user can only access the internet at defined times.

Here is one last note about Windows Live Family Safety. On the Family Safety webpage, click “Web Filtering”. Go down to the bottom of the page where it says “File downloads”. You can decide to uncheck “Allow standard user to download files online”. This will make it less likely your child will download something potentially harmful to your computer.

Now you know a bit about helping protect your children against internet content. You should also know how to view activity reports and set time limits. These are all great ways to keep your family in check and under control.

Warmest Regards,

Erik Mjelde