Dear Norton Community,
I have twin 10-year olds who each have an iPad for personal use and now have Windows 10 laptops for school work. As I have a Norton 360 Subscription that comes with Norton Family, I thought I would try to use it to monitor their screen time as well as restrict some of the things they could do/see. I did not foresee the problems I was creating for myself.
For the iPads, I installed the Norton Family mobile app on each and followed the configuration instructions. However, many of the apps I want my children to be able to use during approved screen time would not work, such as Disney+, Netflix, Prime Video... I tried playing with the Contact Restriction settings, but that didn't help. I couldn't figure out how to set allowances for individual apps. Also, these apps would trigger Blocked Website/Category alerts. I would approve the site, or the category, but I would continue to get these alerts every time they tried to use the apps.
For the Windows Laptops, it's great that there is now a school time function, but as far as I can tell, this needs to be configured at the start of each school day, and if you don't remember to do this, and they only have an hour or two of approved screen time, once they hit the limit, they get locked out in the middle of a lesson. There has to be a way to set daily school time, as well as tag which devices are approved for school time use and which aren't. Additionally, I run into the same issue of blocked categories and websites for many of the sites they use, such as Windows356, Typing Agent,... And approving specific sites or categories did not seem to resolve this issue.
Which brings us to alerts. I realize you can set how often you get alerts and for what. A string of emails would let me know that there was an issue, and within minutes my children would come find me to resolve it. I couldn't figure out how to resolve all of these. Some you could respond to in the app, while others didn't seem to have that option, so I would have to log into Norton on my laptop. Finally, alerts would often take a while to show up in either the mobile app or the online login in. I would get emails saying there was a new alert, but it wouldn't show up in my alerts list for some time.
The amount of trouble this has caused me to resolve their access issues was unsustainable, for me and for them. So my only option was to turn Supervision off for all their devices, which defeats the entire purpose of this exercise.
The bottom line is that this product is not ready for use as intended, unless am I completely missing how I am supposed to configure and use this product.
Maurice