Our newest product, Norton Online Family has hit beta, meaning it's still a product-in-development but of high enough quality for you to try. Right now it's free and I'm using it with great success at home. In fact, it's the first parental control product that actually will bring you closer to your children.
The install is a quick two-step (you can play country music in the background if you like.) Just visit https://onlinefamily.norton.com to create your account. Then go sit at the computer your children use and visit the site again or login. You will download the Norton Safety Minder applet (around 7.8 mb) onto each computer you want to keep your eye on. Make sure the little dog icon in the tool tray is green.
The service requires you use accounts on your computers, whether PC or Mac. Once set up, you can easily check up on what your kids are doing online on the computers you're monitoring. And you can review that information from any computer, any web-enabled device anywhere in the world. So imagine it's summer and you're at the office but the kids are at home online. You can, in real time, see what sites they are visiting, how long they've been online, even what search terms they are using at Google, Ask, CraigsList and YouTube. You can get alerts sent to your email account and respond within seconds to a request from your kids. Maybe a site is being blocked but they have a great reason to visit it? You can unblock from any computer anywhere by logging into your account. So easy.
Another aspect that is family friendly - this is completely transparent to the child. When they start up their computer or browser they are reminded it's being monitored by the software. They will see the dog icon in their tool tray at all times. If they do some activity that is against the House Rules (which you set together as a family), the alert gives them a chance to send a message to the parent. They can apologize, explain why they need to visit that site or extend their online time and get a response from the parent quickly. No more waiting until the parents return to the house from work or wherever they were.
We've been testing at our home and though my teen was quite wary about haveing any kind of filter or blocks put onto her system, so far it's been all positive. As an example, we initially set it to monitor all online activity but block nothing. That way, I would see where she was visiting online and be able to decide whether or not she even needed to be filtered. I'm sure we've all experienced the "over eager" parental controls that can become such a burden to both parent and child with their constant need for adjustments. I quickly saw that her web surfing and activity was quite benign with one exception: a visit to YouTube was followed by a visit to a (ahem) forbidden type of site. this prompted some private mother and daughter discussions about the type of site, her intentions (did she mean to visit that site?) and why it wasn't blocked in the first place.
The surprising outcome was she ASKED me to block certain categories of websites. She was so uncomfortable with her unintended visit to the bad stuff on the Internet, she welcomed the addition of parental protection from Norton Online Family. You can see why I actually felt the product brought us closer as a family!
I can also check up on her Facebook and other social networking accounts, see if she has any I don't know about. I can see who she IMs with (there's even an option to record IM conversations but I don't feel the need for that at the moment.) The software provides suggested filtering categories by age groups but it's completely flexible. You can add specific sites to allow or sites to block. You can set time limits for web activity as well. All the settings are customizable for each child in the household. And if you don't use accounts on your computer, you can still use the service. You just won't be able to identify which child is responsible for which activity.
Many programs give you long lists of web sites and referral addresses in the activity logs. What I liked about Norton Online Family is that each entry into the log is a website. You can see the address and even click on the entry for more information. You'll be shown an image from that site and given the actual url your child was visiting. So if your child was searching in YouTube for "cheerleading videos" but you think he was watching objectionable material, now you can see the actual clicked on video for yourself. And based upon what you find, you can block those search terms from being used in the future if you think there is a problem.
Please visit the website. We have a video there to explain things further. We think it's so important for parents to get closer to what their children are doing online. Even if you think your children know more about technology than you do, this is still a parenting issue. You'll find this service is very easy to use and very friendly from the child's perspective as well. Let me know what you think at marian@norton.com.