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Overwhelmingness of Parental Controls?

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There have been some comments about various aspects of Parental Controls being overwhelming, specifically in this post.  It is true that some of the existing parental control companies will not be so keen on some features, however there is a lot of area for new features and things that are missing from Vista parental controls to be expanded into, like https filtering.

Looking at the overwhelming aspects, the main problem feature there is the application overrides.  This is difficult to setup for parents unless you know something about how the programs are layed out on the computer.  Sadly there is not really much we can do about this, it is a difficult problem to solve.  I think this is one feature that most parents will not use, or will turn on and not know how to use it then turn it off again.  Game settings I don't think are that overwhelming, the ability to change the rating system is there but it is not easy to get at and most parents will most likely not even know the option exists.  The default setting will be set to the rating system for the area windows is sold in.

The logs are very useful, the problem there is how to present the information about things like web sites visited in a way that is easy to understand.  For time constraint reasons we only did a very simple web log viewer in Vista, this is an area that third party tools could be useful.  Writing an enhanced log viewer for the vista parental controls.  All of the logs are in the Crimson logs as outlined in other sections of this log.

Overall I think that parents will use all of the features (including the activity reports) with the exception of application restrictions.

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