Kids: Your illicit Chrome and Chromebook use may soon come to an end

By Mike Flacy October 23, 2013

verizon lte hp chromebook 11 announced retails 379 thumb — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Announced on the official Google Chrome Blog, the development team behind the Chrome Web browser is currently planning to launch a new parental control feature called Supervised Users. Now available in the beta channel for early testers, the Supervised Users feature allows parents to limit access to a specific range of sites on a child’s account within the Chrome interface. Parents will also have able to view a list of recently viewed sites and approve sites that were blocked from view due to the current security settings.

The new feature will also allow parents to lock the Safesearch feature on in order to remove inappropriate listings from Google search results. In order to try out the feature within the Windows or Mac beta version of Chrome, parents will need to sign into Chrome using a Google login in order to create new users. The manager of the supervised user accounts can assign a password as well as a user picture. The process is similar on Chromebooks and Google provides support for up to 18 different users on one Chromebook.

Google Chrome parental control — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Hypothetically, this could be ideal for families that have to share a single computer. Along with allowing parents to keep tabs on the Web history of their children, the Web history of the adults would also be hidden from view since users would have separate accounts when logging into the Chrome browser or through a Chromebook.

At this time, Google hasn’t indicated when the new feature will leave the beta version of Chrome and roll out to the public build. However, it’s likely the new feature would roll out before the end of the year based on Google’s track record with speedy version updates. It would also be useful for all the new laptops and Chromebooks that are given as gifts to children this year during the holidays.

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