Microsoft Family Safety broken!

coupe69 · 25 Sep 2024 at 23:07

Is anyone else using MS Family Safety? I set it up a couple of years ago for my young kids and up until now it's been great for ensuring their time on the computer is as safe as possible with the minimum of fuss setting up. Overall I've been pretty happy with it, as it does a decent job of filtering/logging their internet site visits, and flagging any potentially innappropriate search terms. I can also restrict their time using the PC for games.

However, this week I've come up against an issue. For MS Family Safety to work as intended you need to stay with MS Edge. The problem I'm having is Edge appears to have ground to a halt on their respective profiles. It takes a fair few seconds to browse to a page and obviously this is causing frustrations. When using Edge on my profile there's no issues, but log in using their respective Microsoft accounts and it's a woeful experience. I'm just wondering if anyone has had this issue? I've tried the obvious fixes, clearing cache, repairing Edge, clearing DNS, etc etc, but to no avail. I'm now at a loss, as they need to access the internet, but I don't want to lose out on the nannying side of things as they're still quite young. I've had to install Chrome in the meantime which works absolutely fine.

EDIT: It's probably also worth mentioning that this is running Windows 11 23H2 with the latest updates applied. However, this problem seems more of a profile issue, given that it occurs over several different devices.

coupe69 · 26 Sep 2024 at 09:25

An update on this, just in case anyone else is suffering from this issue. To test, I've tried turning off the "Filter inappropriate websites and searches" button on their profile, which has instantly sorted the slow browsing. It doesn't really help though as this is one of the reasons I use MS Family Safety!

Buffalo2102 · 26 Sep 2024 at 17:45

How about using OpenDNS Family Shield DNS servers?

I haven't used them myself but it looks to be a fairly simple change to restore some control over what they can access?

OspreyO · 26 Sep 2024 at 18:21

I tried family safety and gave up. They needed information like dob which I had nothing but problems with afterwards. One of the kids linked it with the Xbox account causing more complications. They also hacked it somehow and it never restricted them that much.

I tried two different child firewalls and I dumped it all when I got the mesh. I just use the TP link mesh firewall and filters now. Then Google did something to prevent pixels from being identified. Have to use the Mac address. But by that point the kids at least the one hacking it was old enough I didn't need to monitor it anyone.

I have to remove family safety from one of account. It's still there, I think I've to ring them to remove it.

Donnie Fisher · 27 Sep 2024 at 08:31

I turned on the BT family shield option on my broadband, which seems to be fairly decent at blocking inappropriate sites so far. It doesn’t seem to log what’s been tried (to be fair, I’ve not looked very hard for that ) but it just refuses to resolve the site name tried giving a dns error on the page.

coupe69 · 27 Sep 2024 at 09:27

Another update on this.

It appears as though Microsoft have completely buggered their Family Safety app up. There's more and more reports of it being broken, I've had no website logs since Tuesday of this week and the filtering side of things isn't working as intended. It seems kids are free to access anything they want on the internet, despite the "filtering inappropriate websites and searches" button being on!

More info here - https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...websites/5b9773e4-159f-4c21-8315-070899ad8687

I'd advise anyone using this to monitor what their kids are accessing at the moment very carefully.