Monitoring rule change suggestion

I am impressed with Online Family Safety Minder as a means of monitoring children's activity - it is saving us a lot of concern. The one limitation that I see is that a child can create a new user account (as administrator on XP Home) and then logon with that user account which will then not be monitored for activity. It would be nice if any newly created account could automatically be set to inherit the monitoring rules for one of the other user accounts to overcome this possibility.

 

As a stopgap, I have hidden User Accounts from Control Panel on the kid's user accounts to make it harder for them to do this.

 

On the issue of the spurious Safety Minder client turned off messages that has been reported, the impression that I had was that when I updated the monitoring rules on the web site, this would cause the rules to be updated by the Safety Minder client on the local computer. Each time that the rules were updated by the local client, this caused Safety Minder to turn off then on again, generating the spurious email. This became rather annoying, so I simply turned off getting email messages for the client being turned off, as I didn't want to get a message every time that I changed the monitoring rules.

 

However, I do think it would be useful if the online website logged all monitoring rule changes so that they could be viewed online, just to make sure that the rules were not being changed inappropriately to avoid monitoring.

 

Cheers

Rob

[edit: Change subject for clarity.]

Message Edited by shannons on 10-01-2009 06:07 AM

Thanks for the prompt response, Katie.

 

Unfortunately, I have the Safety Minder installed at my sister's, as she needed to monitor her grandchildrens' use of the internet after finding one had been on inappropriate websites. And my sister is 120K down the road, so I cannot get the info directly.

 

Her systems are XP (Home and Professional, with Service Pack 3). The client will not be the latest - I installed it in July, and it was then I gained the impression that it was the client updating (changes in website categories that the children were permitted to access) that caused the spurious messages; but as I said, it was only an impression.

 

I will be back at my sister's in 3 weeks time, so I will have another look at it then to see if I can glean any info on the triggering of the spurious messages. If I find anything, I will repost at that time.

 

Re providing admin rights to the children, yep, probably not a good thing. But as the children are the sole users most of the time, it allows them to pull down all updates to XP and other installed software without problems, which is the reason we went that way.

 

Re the suggestion of providing logs of changes to rules, my suggestion would be 4 columns - a) date/time of change, the child/avatar for which the rule changed, c) the rule that was turned on or off, and d) whether that rule was turned ON or OFF.

 

Cheers

 

Rob

robt51,

 

Thanks for the additional information. 

 

For the suggestion of providing logs for changes of rules, the actions of changing rules should only be done by parents, not by a child.  Would you please tell us the reason why we need to have the logs for changes to rules.

 

Thanks,

Katie

Hi Katie,

 

Hi Katie,

 

The reason for the suggestion of logging the changes to internet rules was as an extra safeguard to check to ensure that a child had not "cracked" the norton online login and managed to change the rules applying to themselves without the parents' knowledge. This shouldn't happen, but some people write these things down (passwords, etc) on scraps of paper, which the kids could then find. (Makes me sound like a very untrusting person, doesn't it - the original internet fascist!).

 

Alternatively, maybe an option to send email notification whenever a rule change occurred.

 

Mind you, I am happy with Online Family as is.

 

Cheers

 

Rob

Hi robt51,

 

Thanks for the additional information.  I'll put it to our enhancement list for the management team to consider.

 

Thanks,

Katie

 

 

I am impressed with Online Family Safety Minder as a means of monitoring children's activity - it is saving us a lot of concern. The one limitation that I see is that a child can create a new user account (as administrator on XP Home) and then logon with that user account which will then not be monitored for activity. It would be nice if any newly created account could automatically be set to inherit the monitoring rules for one of the other user accounts to overcome this possibility.

 

As a stopgap, I have hidden User Accounts from Control Panel on the kid's user accounts to make it harder for them to do this.

 

On the issue of the spurious Safety Minder client turned off messages that has been reported, the impression that I had was that when I updated the monitoring rules on the web site, this would cause the rules to be updated by the Safety Minder client on the local computer. Each time that the rules were updated by the local client, this caused Safety Minder to turn off then on again, generating the spurious email. This became rather annoying, so I simply turned off getting email messages for the client being turned off, as I didn't want to get a message every time that I changed the monitoring rules.

 

However, I do think it would be useful if the online website logged all monitoring rule changes so that they could be viewed online, just to make sure that the rules were not being changed inappropriately to avoid monitoring.

 

Cheers

Rob

[edit: Change subject for clarity.]

Message Edited by shannons on 10-01-2009 06:07 AM