Over here on the Family Safety team, we hear a lot about accounts. There are many different types. In general, when someone is talking about an online “account” they mean a username and password pair that gives them personalized access to products and services. Probably the oldest kind of account online is an e-mail account. Your username is your e-mail address (or just the front part, minus the @domain stuff), and your password is something you picked out and hopefully you change it regularly. To get your e-mail, you need to enter these two pieces of information into the system. Accounts are used for purchases, chat, and generally membership in anything online. One person can have many accounts, and it’s likely this is not uncommon even in children.
Looking at Family Safety software at Microsoft, there are still a lot of different accounts involved. If you’re using Windows Vista parental controls, you apply those controls to a Windows account that your child uses. Some household computers may not have that additional Windows account until the administrator realizes they want to apply parental controls. One thing that Windows does well is to provide an option to create a new Windows account while you’re in the process of setting up parental controls. It would be a pain to have to navigate somewhere else to do this and then come back to setting up parental controls. Windows accounts can be limited accounts or administrator accounts. Administrators can do things like install and uninstall software. You can see how if you’re creating a new Windows account for your child, you’d want that account to be Limited. All Windows accounts can have passwords, but not all do. If your machine has an administrator account without a password, it’s the same as elevating the privileges of all the limited accounts on your machine.
Other Family Safety services from Microsoft are based on online ids called a Passport or Windows Live Account. This is also referred to as a “Windows Live ID.” Of course you have to sign on to your computer somehow. You’ll still use a Windows account for that. After you’ve done that, to access your online services with Windows Live such as Hotmail and Messenger, you’ll use a Windows Live ID. It’s a bit confusing because the word Windows is used in both places. The word to focus on is Live… the reason why this term is helpful is it sounds like something that is alive, that can move around from place to place. A Windows Live ID is useful from any machine with online access, whereas if you create a Windows account, it’s local so it’s only applicable to that one machine.
In usability tests we sometimes see users get hung up on prompts for a Windows Live ID, especially if they have just been through a setup process with their Windows account. Say you create a Windows account called Mom. Then you install Family Safety software from Windows Live and are prompted to sign in. What do you sign in with, is it Mom again? One thing we can do a better job with is help people understand what we’re asking for every time they’re prompted to sign in. Key to doing this is to explain the difference between the different types of accounts. Similar to your Windows account, you can select your Windows Live account to remember your password, which also effectively lets anyone with access to your machine sign in online as you. This does not sound important… after all, these people are invited into your home… but keep in mind for Family Safety, the account settings are maintained online. If you said “no” to a request from your child to view a website, that setting can be changed to “yes” if the settings see appropriate credentials.
Given this landscape, we’d like to ask users of Windows Live OneCare Family Safety how they use their accounts.
Specifically:
1) Do you have a separate Windows account for each family member, or do some still share even after installing Windows Live OneCare Family Safety?
2) Do all these Windows accounts have their own passwords?
3) Are you aware of the privileges between administrator and limited accounts, and do the children end up with limited accounts?
4) If your children are too young to type a password, what choices have you made to work around that?
5) When prompted for a Windows Live ID, do you know what you’re being asked for?
6) Do you know if your child has membership accounts online? (Hint: The Windows Live OneCare Family Safety activity report can provide you with a list of websites your child has visited).
7) Make up your own question and answer it here!
Thanks in advance for the feedback and for taking the time to contribute.
- Elizabeth Grigg, Program Manager, Family Safety
