With online activities become mundane to parents as well as kids in today’s world, Symantec’s approach to parental control makes perfect sense. Norton Online Family is a web-based console where parent can manage the configuration through the website with a small agent on each computer is doing its work enforcing the house rules.
The best thing about Norton Online Family is there is no charge for the service but with unobtrusive ads on the side of the page after you logged in. Symantec’s philosophy that no family should forgo online protection because of economic reasons really impressed me.
Summary page (report)
There is no installation that need to be through because all reports and settings are available through a Web based interface, so parents can monitor while they are on another computer or at work. OnlineFamily.Norton’s user-friendly reports are the best feature of this service because it summarizes types of activities your child is engaged in. Tag cloud is there to help highlighting the most frequent searches where you can go down for more details by clicking an item on the All activity page.
Norton Online Family can also fine-tune the restrictions with 47 filtering categories, including mature content, violence, drugs, hate, pornography, tobacco, and suicide. With this feature on, a Safe Search option will automatically filter offensive material found in major search engines.
Norton Online Family is a free service and Norton Online Family Premier is a subscription service that covers more grounds. You can look the comparison between both free and premium services over here. For me, Norton Online Family (free service) is sufficient for the purpose monitoring your kids online activities.
