New Family Safety features for Windows 8 detailed

Kids won’t like it, but parents will love this.

Microsoft has posted some new information about how they plan to help parents monitor and enforce their child’s PC activity. The new tools and featured coming to Windows 8 are the result of the Microsoft Family Safety Team and they’ve broken the services into two categories: monitoring and enforcement.

When creating a new account in Windows 8, parents can now designate that account as a “child’s account” to turn on the Family Safety to get reports on their activity. After that, parents will receive a weekly email that includes analytical data of their use, such as:

Most popular websites
Latest searches
Amount of time on PC per day
Most used apps and games
Latest Windows Store downloads

Activity Report, via the Building Windows 8 blog

All those features fall under the “monitor” aspect of Family Safety. From there you can log onto the Microsoft services website and exert control over what they can and can’t do. What can parents do? From the Building Windows 8 blog post:

Web filtering, you can chose between several filtering levels.

SafeSearch: When web filtering is active, SafeSearch is locked into the “Strict” setting for popular search engines such as Bing, Google, and Yahoo. This will filter out adult text, images, and videos from your search results.

Time limits: With Windows 8, you now can restrict the number of hours per day your child can use their PC. For example, you might set a limit of one hour on school nights and two hours on weekends. This is in addition to the bedtime limits currently available in Windows 7.

Windows Store: Activity reports list the most recent Windows Store downloads, and you can set a game-rating level, which prevents your children from seeing apps in the Windows Store above a particular age rating.

Application and game restrictions: As in Windows 7, you can block specific applications and games or set an appropriate game rating level.

The notification users will see when they've exceeded their limit.

You can try all that Family Safety has to offer when Windows 8 Release Preview comes out in a few months. In the meantime, enjoy your freedom kids. If you want to see a video of it in action, follow the links below.

Links: Keeping your family safer with Windows 8,

Tags: family saftey, windows 8, windows 8 family safety, windows 8 release preview