McAfee Family Protection 2009 review

The internet can be a scary prospect for parents.

With McAfee Family Protection 2009, it's up to you how much leeway you give your kids. Different user accounts can be set to block different things, so you can trust older kids and give them more freedom.

The administration interface is web-based and can be accessed even if you're away from home. You can apply web filtering, block inappropriate YouTube videos and torrent search sites, control when different users are allowed online, block email from unapproved addresses and view logs of Instant Messenger chats and visited websites. Family Protection can send email alerts if a user tries to access unauthorised content.

Social networking controls try to record posts that include specified information such as your address or your kids' phone numbers. Our usage reports didn't pick up on Facebook posts containing the number we asked it to spot. The program logged Windows Live Messenger conversations, but not Facebook chat sessions. A web-blocking tab lets you ban content by pre-defined categories such as 'drugs' and 'hate sites'. Sex and pornography are in separate categories, so older teens can visit sex education sites. You can also add blacklist keywords.

Its blocking didn't always work: we viewed explicit adverts for escort services on Gumtree. On one test PC, Google image search results were blocked as pornography, even when we enabled SafeSearch. On another, image search returned explicit images. Common parental control workarounds, such as The Onion Router (TOR) are blocked, but technically knowledgable teens could bypass this software using freely available virtual machine software.

Family Protection protected us more often than not, but its content blocking was inconsistent. We'll be doing a round-up of the top parental control software in Shopper 263.