What is Norton Family and what does it do?

What is Norton House and what does IT do?

Children gathered around a tablet PC while parents are distracted in background

(Image credit: Norton)

Norton Family is a parental control rooms from the glorious antivirus vendor, which covers PCs and mobiles. It's an in-depth product that seeks to ensure that your kids stay innocuous online.

But how does it do that, and exactly what features are included?

In this clause, we're going to provide a breakdown of the functionality included with Norton Family and what devices IT supports, in front discussing how upright this suite is for paternal assure duties.

What is Norton Family?

Norton Kinfolk is a parental keep in line cortege that is designed to keep your children unhurt when they'Re online – or offline for that matter (more on that later). It rather niftily provides protection for every your kids, no matter how many, with unlimited devices covered.

The kind of features offered here include monitoring to see what your offspring is up to online, the power to restrict device utilization to certain multiplication, and of course defenses to keep kids from stumbling onto whatsoever nastiness while browsing the web.

Note that you as wel get this parental control software system if you buy the more advanced security suites from this firm, viz. Norton 360 Elegant or Norton 360 Premium (in these suites it's called Parental Control rather than Norton Family, simply it's the synoptical matter).

Norton Family Desktop and Mobile App Interfaces — (Image credit: Norton)

What devices can I wont Norton Family unit on?

Norton Family can be installed on unlimited devices, and supports not just Windows PCs, but also Android and iOS devices (the only affair you father't get here is support for Macs, basically). Windows 10 (simply not Windows 10 S Mode) and Windows 8 are supported, and on ambulatory, you need to be lengthways Android 6.0 Beaver State improve, or if you have an Apple device, iOS 13 or newer. Note that the former requirement will live upped to Android 8.0 in December 2021.

Norton Family: what features does it sustain?

Want to know what this suite is capable of? Permit's look at whatsoever of the highlights of Norton Family's feature laid. Note that some abilities are only obtainable on certain platforms – soh app blocking, for instance, is just on Android – and we'll ease off this rising wherever this is the case.

Web Supervision

A core element of any small-arm of maternal control software program, this lets you realize where your kids are browsing connected the web, and facilitates the blocking of inappropriate sites. Information technology's possible to block content o'er a whole host of various categories (not just the accustomed options relating to pornography, drugs etcetera).

Fourth dimension Supervision

As the epithet suggests, this allows for scene time limits and managing when your kids can use their devices, blocking them off at bedtime OR mayhap repast times (or you crapper use 'Instant Lock' to temporarily, but instantly, block a device).

School Clip

With house school mayhap still on your mind following lockdowns in some countries, this feature helps to manage remote learning on the child's gimmick, keeping them focused on work and non allowing any distractions by restrictive web access strictly to educational content (which could be useful for homework time, too).

Search Supervision

This lets you ride herd on your tyke's web searching activities to see if they're looking anything inappropriate. It likewise implements Norton's Safe and sound Search to permeate out wrong lookup results. Furthermore, videos watched at YouTube are monitored and you can see a thumbnail and description to quickly Lashkar-e-Toiba you judge whether a viewed clip might be anything potentially dodgy.

Norton Family Location Monitoring on a mobile phone — (Image credit: Norton)

Motile App Supervision

With this feature you can see what apps your kids take up downloaded, and block whatsoever that you feel are improper. Note, however, this this is for Android devices only, so iOS users are left out here (that said, this isn't Norton's fault, as the reason is committed in the way Apple implements its mobile OS with tight security measures).

Placement Oversight

For parents worried close to where their child might comprise not when online, but in the real world instead, Norton Family offers a egg-filled arrangement of location tracking (and a 30-day history of where they've been) for both Android and iOS mobiles. Alert Me is a far feature tied in with this which delivers automatic alerts when a child reaches certain defined locations (school, rest home so off), with impressively in-astuteness options and controls for these functions.

Unit of time/Weekly Reports

Some equally in-astuteness reports are provided on everything your kids have done, and these can be accessed from a well-organized web portal.

How good enough is Norton Family?

Norton has a good repute within the security cosmos and the Norton antivirus engine is systematically stratified extremely by the freelance test labs. That, of course, isn't strictly relevant to the Norton Family product itself, but the pedigree of the developer is always a consideration and this is a quality genitor control retinue which blends power and public toilet with some corking filtering and location controls - our Norton Kinsperson inspection goes into more detail.

The selling price for Norton Family is more than reasonable given that it delivers support for an straight-out amount of devices, soh no more matter to how big your family – you bet practically kit is owned in that – you'll be covered with one subscription.

That's an impressive treasure proposition, but the opposite consideration is whether you might wishing to plump for Norton 360 Deluxe instead, which includes the Parental Control mental faculty.

Now, Norton 360 Deluxe is a little to a greater extent expensive if you go by the recommended asking prices, just the net security suite is invariably heavily discounted, and after Leontyne Price-cutting is generally only a emotional more expensive than Norton Family (if non the Lapplander Leontyne Price, at times). The trade-off is that only five devices are supported away Norton 360 Deluxe – although take down that you still get unlimited installations of Norton Family – and with that caution in mind, you are buying a in full-fledgling security suite with a whole host of unneeded features for not a lot Sir Thomas More money.

It's meriting thought about, certainly, but the bottom line is some these products offer good value, and feature-wise they compare favourably to rivals – rattling favourably in the character of Norton Family.

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Darren is a freelancer written material news show and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a panoramic range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of terzetto decades, and writes books in his free time (his debut novel - 'I Screw What You Did Last Supper' - was published past Hachette UK in 2013).