Staying safer online

Since I’m the computer expert in my family, my older sister asked me to help her set up her new computer. My sister has two daughters, and all three of them use the same computer. I recommended that she set up separate user accounts in Windows Vista for each person, and then I explained to her the advantages of doing this:

• Each person can customize the desktop the way she likes. For example, my youngest niece can use her Hello Kitty desktop background, and her older sister can use a picture of her favorite band.

• Each person can customize her own Start menu and taskbar. (Having her own "space" makes my youngest niece feel like a real grown-up!)

• Each person has her own set of Internet favorites. My sister’s money management websites won’t appear on her daughters’ Favorites lists, and the kids’ stuff won’t appear on my sister’s list.

• Windows Live Family Safety—a program that can help protect kids from online content and websites that parents don’t want them to see works better when each person has a separate user account in Windows. This allows parents to view individualized reports about the sites each child is visiting. I’ll explain more about this later.

If my sister is logged on to the computer and one of the girls needs to access something on it, Fast User Switching lets them switch between user accounts without having to close what they’re working on. Also, with Fast User Switching, they can stay signed in to Family Safety.

Setting up individual accounts is easy, but you must be logged on with an administrator account to do it. For more information about setting up individual user accounts, see "Create a user account" in Windows Help and Support.

My sister also needed help in setting up online protection for her kids. She wanted to make sure they didn’t have access to inappropriate online content and that they weren’t contacting potentially dangerous people on the Internet. As I mentioned, one of my nieces is a young child and the other is a teenager, so they needed different levels of age-appropriate protection.

After setting up user accounts for my sister and her daughters, we were on our way to protecting the kids with Windows Live Family Safety. With Family Safety, we were able to choose three levels of filtering: strict, which blocks all websites except child-friendly sites; basic, which blocks only adult content; and custom, which blocks only the categories that you choose to block. No matter what filtering level we chose, we were able to allow or block specific websites for the kids. I chose the settings that fit my sister’s children and I paid close attention to what my sister thought was appropriate for them.

After showing her how to use Family Safety activity reports to see which sites her daughters visited, my sister decided to allow them to use Windows Live Messenger, Hotmail, and Spaces, but she decided to approve or disapprove any new contact they added to these programs so she that she would know who her daughters are talking to online at all times. I showed my nieces how to ask their mom for permission to see a blocked site and how to add a new Messenger, Hotmail, or Spaces contact—right from the web. They thought it was easy!

Children can easily request permission to visit a blocked website

Now my sister can review and approve or block their requests from almost any web-connected computer:

And parents can easily approve (or deny) website access requests

Family Safety runs on my sister’s home computer and connects to the Family Safety service, which stores her settings. This prevents her children—both of whom are pretty savvy about computers—from changing settings to disable the protection. They weren’t so pleased with their Auntie Gloria for setting this up, but I promised I'd make it up to them somehow.

To help manage how my nieces use the computer, I complemented Family Safety protection with Parental Controls in Windows Vista. Parental Controls allow me to set limits on my nieces’ access to the web: the hours that they can log on to the computer, which games they can play, and which programs they can run. To set up Parental Controls, I made sure the girls had standard user accounts (not administrator accounts). To find out more about user accounts, take a look at this Help topic: User accounts: frequently asked questions.

Here's how to turn on Parental Controls:

1. Open Parental Controls by clicking the Start button , clicking Control Panel, and then, under User Accounts, clicking Set up Parental Controls.  If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.

2. Click the standard user account for which you want to set Parental Controls.

3. UnderParental Controls, clickOn.

Note

Parental Controls are available only in Windows Vista Ultimate, Home Premium, Home Basic, and Starter editions, and they are not available if your computer belongs to a domain.

Games are another area that my sister is concerned about. She knows there are violent and sexually explicit games on the market, and she doesn’t want her daughters exposed to them. Most games have game ratings that you can use to help you decide whether the game is appropriate for your children. Game ratings are set by a game ratings board, which is an organization that establishes guidelines for video game content for different regions and countries. To find out more, see How to tell if games are appropriate for children. Parental Controls keep track of the games on my sister’s computer and make sure the kids can only play games that are rated as appropriate for their ages.

As we continued with our setup, I began telling my sister about an e‑mail I had recently received that appeared to be from my bank. The e‑mail stated “This e‑mail is to inform you that your account will be suspended within 48 hours due to account inactivity. You will need to confirm certain account information in order to continue your account subscription.” I recognized this as a common online phishing attack (pronounced like the word fishing) that looks like an official notice from a trusted source, such as a bank, credit card company, or reputable online merchant, but is really a way to direct unsuspecting recipients to a fraudulent website where they’re asked to provide personal information, such as an account number or password. This information is then usually used for identity theft. My sister was eager to set up protection against this type of scam and other online threats to her computer.

Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 both include built-in protection from phishing attacks: Phishing Filter in Internet Explorer 7, and SmartScreen Filter in Internet Explorer 8. When you browse to a website that’s either a suspected or known phishing site, you’ll see a warning message. To find out more about Phishing Filter and SmartScreen Filter, see Phishing Filter: frequently asked questions and SmartScreen Filter: frequently asked questions.

In addition, Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 prevent websites from automatically running ActiveX controls, helping to protect your computer. If a site attempts to automatically run an ActiveX control, Internet Explorer notifies you and displays a gold bar at the top of your browser window. By right-clicking the gold bar, you can choose to run or ignore the ActiveX control.

Now my sister doesn’t need to worry about connecting to the Internet, either for herself or for her children. With Windows Vista, Internet Explorer, and Windows Live Family Safety on her side, the bad guys don’t stand a chance!