Qustodio v1.9

When I reviewed the Qustodio parental control service a few years ago, it was an impressive debut that showed great potential. Qustodio v1.9 has realized that potential, with a few bugs fixed and useful new features added. You'll pay $49.95 per year for the full-featured premium edition, but the free edition still offers quite a lot. I'll distinguish between free and premium features in this review.

Qustodio is designed to guide and monitor your kids no matter what device they're using. You can configure up to eight child profiles and install it on up to ten PCs, Macs, or Android devices. Does that sound like your household? Qustodio may be what you need.

Getting Started
Most of Qustodio's functionality is Web-based, but you do need to install its local client on each device that your kids use. During the very first installation, you'll create a Qustodio account, including a master password. A wizard walks you through initial configuration steps; of course you can make changes later.

You'll enter the name, birth year, and gender for each child's profile, and select from one of a handful of boy or girl avatar icons. Next you'll match each profile with the corresponding Windows user account on this computer. You can click a button to create a new user account, if necessary.

When you install Qustodio on another PC, Mac, or a device running Android 4.2 or later, you'll simply match each child account with a user account. Earlier Android editions don't support multiple users, so you can specify just one child per device.

During installation you can enter a device name and optionally check a box to hide Qustodio, making it a stealth installation. Note that if you do choose stealth installation, you'll have to configure it so that it doesn't blow its own cover by blocking website categories.

Online Portal
Setting up the local client on your family's devices is a one-time activity. Once that's done, all your interaction with the program will be through its online portal. On logging in, you'll see one child's activity summary, with tabs across the top to let you select any of the other children.

On your first visit you probably won't see any activity. This is the time to configure Qustodio's rules for each child. I'll come back to the portal and its reports; for now we'll look at configuration.

Web Content Filtering
Qustodio distinguishes 29 different categories of websites. By default, it's set to block access for ten categories, among them Weapons, Pornography, and Loopholes. That last category is important?it refers websites that could allow kids to circumvent parental control.

For each category you can choose to Allow access, Block access, or Alert parents via email. If your aim is to monitor the child's Internet usage in stealth mode, you'll want to set all categories to Allow or Alert.

Qustodio originally relied totally on real-time analysis to categorize websites, and did a good job. The current edition speeds the categorization process using a database of known sites, but retains the real-time analysis. In testing, it handily distinguished between erotic and innocent stories on a short-story website, blocking only the former.

Many Web content filtering tools include an option to block uncategorized websites. For a database-centered product, that can mean that any very new site gets blocked, which may be a problem. With Qustodio's real-time analysis, an uncategorized site will typically be one that's deliberately obfuscating its content to evade analysis, perhaps by putting all text in the form of images, so I'd advise blocking such sites. Qustodio can also force Safe Search on any search websites that support it.

Like all good Web content filters, Qustodio is browser-independent. It also has the ability to block secure HTTPS sites by category, an ability shared with Net Nanny 6.5, Windows Live Family Safety, and AVG Family Safety but not many others. It did a fine job blocking access to secure anonymizing proxies.

Like Net Nanny and WebWatcher, Qustodio goes one step further, actually filtering HTTPS content. I checked by unblocking the Loopholes category and logging in with a secure anonymizing proxy. I still couldn't visit sites matching other blocked categories.

One weakness remains in the Web content filtering area. A tech-savvy child with Administrator access can launch a simple three word network command that will disable Qustodio's control. The product still reports itself as active, but its ability to control and monitor access is gone.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/ac1JSJrOmxY/0,2817,2417680,00.asp

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