Parental control in Windows 8: how to activate and configure it

Safety is a factor that is taken into account today, especially when it comes to protecting the little ones in the housein the face of everything inappropriate that can be found on the Internet. Although recommended best practices, for example, are to never leave a child alone with an electronic device that has Internet access, Windows 8 offers a number of more robust features to help with this task.

Thanks to the new Child Protection, the name given to this feature, we will not only be able to establish blocks for certain web pages or applications, but we will also have options such as sending activity logs to an email that let's introduce, establish different web filters, etc.

Create an account with Child Protection

First of all, we need to have at least two accounts on our device. One would be ours, for system administrator, and the rest are those intended to have limitations through child protection.

To create a new account, enter the keyboard shortcut Windows key + I, and click on change PC settings. From here, we go to the users category, and select Add a user.

When entering the data, and selecting if we want an online or local account, in the last step we will be asked if it is a child's account, and if we want to activate child protection.

How to set up Child Protection

Once we have created our account, if we have marked the option that you can see in the image in the previous section, the corresponding configuration window should appear automatically. Otherwise, we would simply have to enter the control panel, establish a view by icons, and select the Child Protection option.

From here, we will select the account for which we want to modify the protection settings, and we will see the following options:

Child Lock: Activate or deactivate child lock.
Activity Report: Activate or deactivate the activity report. If we enter here, and go to the Child Protection website, whose link is at the beginning of the window, we will be able to configure the system in a more exhaustive way and obtain more complete activity reports.
Web Filtering: Controls the websites the user can access. From the service&39;s website, it allows us to choose between categories, such as online communication only>"
Time limits: establishes time slots in which the user can use the device, thus preventing access outside of said hours .
Windows Store and Game Restrictions: Allows you to block Windows Store games and apps based on rating, or by name.
Application restrictions: controls the applications that the user can run, marking only those allowed or allowing them all.

Consulting activity reports

Without a doubt, one of the most interesting features of Child Protection in Windows 8 are the Activity Reports, which we recommend accessing directly from the Protection website Childish.

As you can see in the following images, they are very complete, and allow us to see graphs with web activity, the most visited pages by user, usage time graphs, most used applications, recent downloads, last browser searches, etc.

If we go deeper into web activity for example, we will see exactly all the pages visited, when the last visit was made, the number of visits to them, and directly block or allow any of them from here.

In team activity, we can check a list of all downloaded apps, downloaded files, played games, session time and many other aspects.

How to receive activity reports in an email

As soon as we activate Child Protection, we will receive an email at the address we have related to our team's account, with a few suggestions to use the service correctly.

From then on, and automatically, we will automatically receive a report on the activities of the user in question every week, although we can change the frequency with which we receive such notifications or directly deactivate them, using the links that is at the bottom of every email we receive.

We can also configure it from the web page, to select how often we will receive requests from the account with protection, so that we grant permission to a certain service, in addition to the frequency of activity reports as previously mentioned.