Review: McAfee Family Protection
- Article 14 of 19
- MacUser, August 2010
McAfee Family Protection is designed to prevent children accessing Internet content and Mac applications that their parents don’t want them to access. It will monitor program usage to show what they have been accessing, prevent them from using the Mac at certain times of day, and block access to web sites that might contain harmful content. If they do try to access ‘harmful’ web sites or applications, Family Protection can send email alerts to the parents.
But like a lot of Mac ‘security’ software, Family Protection is largely redundant and poorly designed. The implementation of these functions in Family Protection largely follows the Windows interface style, and some functions are only accessible through its Dock pop-up menu. Mac integration is reduced further still by Family Protection using its own accounts system, rather than standard OS X system accounts. The settings of the logged-in Family Protection account determine what features are implemented. This does at least mean that if you only have one OS X user account, you can share it with your family, but it’s very counterintuitive and requires you to remember to log out of your privileged account when you’re finished using your Mac. The vast majority of Family Protection’s functions are also already available in OS X through the Parental Controls of managed user accounts.
Family Protection does at least do what is says on the tin. It works very well at blocking things – too well in some instances. After initial installation, we found all web sites were blocked until we logged into the app. Even when logged in as an admin, the app blocked all access to an SSL-enabled Exchange email account, despite email filtering being switched off – indeed Family Protection’s email filtering is only supposed to work with POP accounts, which means it’s no use to anyone with the default Mail.app settings and a MobileMe family pack, for example.
Using a constantly updated online list, the program will block up to 35 categories of web site, which goes beyond OS X’s adult content filtering to include gambling sites and sites about cheating at school, for example. Google image searches are automatically intercepted and “Safe Search”-enabled, although that still won’t stop Google sending you ‘unsafe’ images. You can also (allegedly) ban specific keywords, and create whitelists and blacklists of sites. A random check of toxic sites proved Family Protection impenetrable in this regard and triggered email alerts as promised. However, Family Protection is too low-end to offer partial filtering of web pages: even with keyword filtering turned on, random Google searches for ‘adult’ keywords still returned results that were anything but family friendly, although the sites themselves were blocked; equally, FaceBook filtering is all or nothing, with no options to block just specific apps or chat, for example.
Unlike OS X’s parental controls, Family Protection will only blacklist specific apps from accessing the Internet, not stop them from running at all; there’s no whitelist, either. The list of apps that can be blocked is less than extensive as well: the IM options don’t cover obvious examples such as Skype and TweetDeck, and the filesharing options don’t include Bittorrent, so you’ll need to add these programs one at a time.
McAfee assumes a certain limited skillset of children, so if your children do know your OS X admin password because you share an account, they can turn Family Protection’s filtering abilities off by deleting the obviously titled “parentalctrl.kext” with Terminal and restarting – there’s no self-healing ability built in and Family Protection will report itself as still functioning correctly.
On balance, this is a poor, basic, unintuitive port of a Windows program that offers very little beyond what’s built into OS X. If you do want to control your family’s access and usage of the Internet, stick with what you already have.