We tested Norton Family’s parental controls for Windows using a desktop computer running Windows 10. We tested Norton Family’s iOS capabilities on an iPhone XS running iOS 14.6, and we tested the Android functionality using a Samsung Galaxy A71 running Android 11.
Getting Started With Norton Family
When you first sign in to the Norton Family dashboard, you need to create profiles for each child you wish to monitor. To add a child, enter a name, choose a restriction level (low, moderate, high, and very high), and either select an avatar or upload a profile photo. Next, you specify the device on which you want to install Norton Family and follow the instructions for that platform.
Installing Norton Family on a Windows account is easy. Setup is handled via the Norton Family Installer application. The file is 64 MB and took about 20 seconds to install in testing. Next, you sign in to your account and either create a profile for your child or choose your child’s profile and add the computer to their associated device list. If a computer has several accounts, the installer asks which login belongs to your child.
We recommend configuring Norton Family on a non-admin account to prevent your child from uninstalling the software. Of course, workarounds still exist. Virtualization apps such as Oracle’s VM VirtualBox are one option for a clever child, because Norton Family can’t block desktop apps. Non-admin users can’t easily install any apps, but then again, they would only need admin permission once to install one. In any case, the entire process to set up Norton Family only takes a few minutes. Once you complete the installation, the child sees a notification tray icon informing them that they are being monitored.
Norton Family offers both an iOS app for parents (Norton Family for Parents) and one for installing on your child’s device (Norton Family). Most of the app and content blocking on the phone is performed by Screen Time, rather than Norton Family. If your child uses an iOS, iPadOS, or MacOS device, you may want to use Apple’s Screen Time features rather than paying for the Norton Family service.
Norton Family’s Family app for Android includes both a Child and Parent mode. Much of the functionality of the web console is present in the Parent mode on the mobile app.
Web Interface
Norton Family’s utilitarian yet attractive web interface organizes features and settings while maintaining ample white space. In the upper-right-hand corner, you can access account and subscription settings, your parent profile, and a contextual Help button specifically for Norton Family. You can add other parental figures to your account, too. Anyone that you add will have full access to your account settings and all of each child’s activities, so be sure to invite only people you trust completely.
One annoying thing about the interface is that the dashboard logs you out automatically after only a few minutes of inactivity, and there’s no way to change that. In general, automatic logouts are good for security, but you ought to be able to adjust them. You can enable multifactor authentication for your account, a security feature we like to see. You can receive security codes via a mobile authenticator app, SMS, or using a security key in your device’s USB port. In testing, we used Norton’s multifactor authentication with Google Authenticator successfully.
The main page has a tab for Alerts and one for each Child profile you set up. The Alerts tab (you can filter this by an individual child) shows a list of notifications related to your child’s activity, such as if they tried to access a blocked website. One useful feature is that you can make rule changes based on these alerts; for example, if your child tries to visit a blocked site, and you want to allow it, you can click the item’s option menu (vertical ellipsis to the far left) to do so.
If you select a child and an associated device, you see an overview of their activity across each of the six supervision categories: Web, Time, Mobile App, Location, Search, and Video. You can enable or disable any of the monitoring categories from here (as well as broad supervision), but to make changes to the rules (called House Rules) you need to click the View Details link within that category. Individual categories are divided into two tabs: Activities and House Rules. You can add or edit a child’s profile from the main page and add another device, too.
Web Filtering
The central feature of most parental control systems is the web content filter, the component that keeps kids from accidentally (or deliberately) visiting inappropriate websites. Norton Family’s content filter offers some customizations, such as the ability to restrict and allow individual websites. Kids can also request access to prohibited websites, which is a feature missing from the Editors’ Choice winner Qustodio.
To get started, click on the Web section from the main dashboard. First, you choose a restriction level based on a child’s age range. These preset configurations determine the categories available to your child and Norton Family’s behavior when they try to access a site in that category: Monitor (Low), Warn (Medium), and Block (High). You can customize any of the presets to fit your specific needs or choose to Monitor, Warn, or Block specific websites. Monitor turns off web blocking, Warn sends the child a warning but allows the child to access the website, and Block does not allow access to the website.
Norton Family’s 40-odd content categories include entries such as Alcohol, Cult, Drugs, File Sharing, Mature Content, Online Chat, Pornography, Sex Education, Social Networking, and Web Proxies. From the Activities tab, you can view a child’s most active categories and every site they access. The list may be massive, so Norton Family lets you limit the display to questionable activity or filter by a category, device, or time range. Clicking the Show More button for an item in the list shows more details, such as a thumbnail of the page, categories assigned to the site, and the number of visits. From the detailed display, you can also choose to dispute the categorization, as well as allow or block the site or category. It’s much more than a static report.
Norton Family requires you to enable an extension on desktop browsers. The extensions are not enabled by default and can be disabled or removed with ease. Reinstalling extensions requires you to uninstall and reinstall the Norton Family app on the computer if the extension is not in the browser store. Norton Family’s desktop app still blocks prohibited websites without the extensions, but search filtering and video monitoring do not work. There are browser extensions available for Chrome, Edge, and Firefox. There are no browser extensions for Opera, but the desktop app blocked prohibited sites on that browser as well.
We tested browsing in Incognito Mode with Google Chrome, and blocked websites remained blocked by the Norton Family desktop app. We also received an alert when Incognito browsing was enabled. Norton Family successfully filtered prohibited websites using Firefox and Tor browsers, too.
Turning on Search Supervision tells Norton Family to force Safe Search on Google, Bing, and Yahoo. You can also see a list of what kids are searching for in the Search tab on the Activity page. We tested this feature in a Chrome browser and found that it works as advertised. As noted above, kids must have the Norton Family Extension enabled on their desktop browsers for this to work. Norton Family’s restrictions on YouTube searches only apply for the Norton Family browser which is available for mobile devices; they do not work on desktop versions of the site. Privacy-focused search engine, DuckDuckGo, is immune to any such controls.
Norton Family works well with a VPN, though the program does block access to VPN download sites. Using Proton VPN, which was already installed on the desktop, we tested the efficacy of web filtering while connected to a server in the United States. Norton Family successfully blocked all of the prohibited sites we tried to visit.
Time Supervision
Norton Family helps parents manage when children use their hardware. Net Nanny limits the amount of time a child can spend on the internet but does not lock down their hardware. With Qustodio, parents can schedule hardware usage and internet usage, or even limit the time spent on specific programs. Kaspersky Safe Kids lets parents choose to block access when time is up, warn the child when they’ve reached their limit, or block the device from the internet. Norton Family’s time supervision works on Android, iOS, and Windows.
As with content filtering, time supervision is automatically configured based on the child’s age. The preset age categories don’t affect how many hours a child can use their smartphone, but they do change the hours in which it is operable. If you want to change the schedule or daily limit, you can do so in half-hour increments on an interactive timeline. We prefer the grid-style schedule used by many competing products, as it’s easy to block out a time range on every day of the week with a single mouse drag.
Once a child hits their limit, they cannot launch any apps, save for the phone app (unless you block that specifically). If your child tries to open an app, they will see a message from Norton Family with the option to unlock the device with a PIN or call an emergency contact.
Norton Family’s time-tracking happens on a per-device basis, whereas others consider usage across all devices. We prefer the latter in some cases, so a child who runs out of internet time on the iPad can’t just switch to the PC and keep surfing. Qustodio lets you choose between an overall time allowance or individual settings. We prefer Qustodio’s more flexible style.
In the Activity tab on the Settings page, parents can view a chart comparing how many hours a child used against how many they were allotted. Each phone, tablet, and PC is tracked separately, and you can view activity from up to the last 30 days.
Location Tracking
In addition to keeping your kids safe online, Norton Family can help you make sure that your kids are at a safe location in the real world. The latest version of Norton Family includes geofencing capabilities.
On the Activities tab in the Location section, you can view a map with pins for recent locations and a timeline that identifies when each pin was dropped. Clicking a pin reveals its actual address. In testing, Norton Family successfully tracked our test device when we went to a restaurant for dinner. You can filter a child’s location history by date as well as time.
You can get a notification when your child strays too far outside of a set boundary with a radius of up to 10500 feet. Locategy’s geofencing boundary only goes up to 150 feet, while Boomerang lets you draw custom boundaries around an area. There is also a Check-In feature on the Norton Family Android Child App that allows children to send a location alert to their parents.
Apps and Messaging
Norton Family cannot block individual games or apps on PCs but can do so on Android and iOS devices. If you want more control over the kinds of games and apps your child uses on their Windows PC, MacOS, and mobile devices, look into the free parental controls from Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
Norton did away with the Personal Information section in the Child Profile category. This feature prevented children from sharing information like SSN, phone numbers, email addresses, and other personal data over chat and social networks like Facebook. Norton also no longer monitors Facebook activity. If you’re concerned about your child’s activity on social apps like Facebook, Instagram, or Tiktok, you can look into the built-in parental controls on those apps.
Video Monitoring
Norton Family can monitor what videos your child watches on YouTube and Hulu’s websites, but not their apps. In the Video section, you can see a list of all the videos your child has watched. Each item includes the date and time of viewing along with the video’s category. Opening an item gets you the full description, a thumbnail image, and a link so you can view the clip yourself. This feature worked fine in testing; it recorded our activity of watching a video on YouTube’s mobile site. The software also records Hulu viewing activity. We wish that this functionality applied to other video streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video as well.
Norton Family for iOS
After the parent or supervisor downloads iOS app and installs a VPN and MDM profile on the child’s phone, they need to go to the Screen Time section of the iOS Settings menu and enable Content & Privacy Restrictions. From there, the parent must make several changes to the settings, including disabling Safari and any other installed browsers, disabling app deletion, and enabling a 12+ age restriction to prevent downloading new browsers.
The main screen of the parent app shows a list of your monitored children, a School Time toggle, and an Instant Lock toggle. The School Time option, when enabled, restricts your child to access to websites such as those in the educational, health, kids, searches, sports, technology, and webmail categories during a certain time each day. You can go through the 33 default allowed sites yourself to decide which ones are appropriate for your child and restrict access as necessary. Changes made in the iOS Parent app took effect immediately on the child’s phone.
On the Child device, Norton Browser is the default browser app. In testing, it successfully blocked adult websites. The three hash marks in the upper right corner of the browser screen open a menu that allows your child to check in, request a screen time extension, view the House Rules, and see Bookmarks, History, and Settings. The House Rules let the child know that some websites are blocked, their searches, videos watched, and location are monitored, and time restrictions have been placed on the device.
In testing, installed apps such as Google Chrome and YouTube were completely inaccessible on the Child device. Other apps, such as the Instagram and PBS Video apps, triggered Website Blocked alerts from Norton Family, but the apps were accessible. Downloading new apps was also allowed. We downloaded Snapchat and logged into the app, only triggering a Website Blocked alert. The alert will only annoy a child, rather than prevent them from accessing prohibited apps. Apps running in the background, like Gmail, also triggered a Website Blocked alert in testing.
The Device Lock function prevents all apps and activities except calling, texting, Photos, and Notes on the Child iOS device. After the device is unlocked, accessing prohibited apps did not trigger any alerts, which is bad, but certain apps like web browsers remained blocked. The Device Lock function also rearranges the app order on the child’s device, so keep that in mind.
The location monitoring feature lets you keep an eye on where your child’s device is located. The location section of the Parent app is a wrapper of the Norton Family website rather than part of the actual app. You can locate the device on a map immediately, but you can’t set alerts to tell you if and when your child leaves a designated area like you can with the web version. Geofencing is also unavailable from the iOS Parent app.
Apple has made it hard for any third-party parental control apps to retain relevance on Apple’s platforms, and Norton Family is a victim of these changes. Screen Time is a free and well-functioning choice for parents with children who have iOS, iPadOS, or MacOS devices.
Norton Family for Android
Once you select a monitored child on your Android, the app displays tabs for Alerts, Activity, and Rules across the top with individual options organized under each section. All the rules and activity tracking work well, regardless of whether you configure them on the desktop or via the parent mode on Android. App blocking is an Android-only feature for Norton Family.
In Child Mode, the Norton Family app simply opens the Norton Family Browser. It also lets the child access the House Rules from a left-hand menu. Your child can download and use new apps while the device is in Child mode, but the parent receives an alert on their device when this occurs. You can block Google Play itself, so that’s one way to keep the child from downloading new apps.
If a device is set up in Child mode, parents can sign in from this menu as well to make changes as needed. Just be sure to switch back to Child Mode before handing it back to your kid!
Monitoring Made Easy
Norton Family offers parental control and monitoring features for parents of today’s hyper-connected kids. It tracks an unlimited number of devices, has an intuitive web interface, offers geofencing, and logs lots of usage data. However, Norton Family does not support Macs, does not block individual apps and games on PCs, and relies heavily on Apple’s free Screen Time feature for iOS. In addition, unlocking the device breaks part of the Norton Family iOS functionality, and the program does not monitor social media sites. Qustodio is still our Editors’ Choice winner for the category because it has better platform support and more advanced features.