Family safety: Feedback on recent changes to multi-device management

Hi Brad -

No, Family Safety wasn't able to aggregate the time spent on each device into one "total device time" per day limitation.

With 3 kids and up to six Windows (7,10TP) computers and an Xbox 360 for them to use it took the spamfest of activity report emails today for to notice this ridiculous change in policy and next week there will be more of them. I am pretty peeved Microsoft!

Even despite the possible reasons of this change with Win 10 coming I find the lack of a global settings option of an account from the makers of active directory a ridiculous notion.

Please backtrack else I'll think it's deliberate and that would really be worrying!  Even though I will most likely will upgrade to 10 I don't want this feature to remain exclusive to 10...

Also agree with the OP.  As it stands Family Safety is broken if you are trying to use it for multiple devices.

There seem to be quite a few threads on this now and in this one someone from Microsoft made this reply:

If you have children in your Microsoft family that sign into more than one device, you may notice that accounts you had previously linked now appear separately in your family roster. We are making this change in preparation of new features coming soon in Windows 10 that will help you manage child accounts across multiple devices in one place. We apologize for any inconvenience—thanks for your patience as we get things ready.

Not sure what to make of this but it suggests family safety might remain broken until Windows 10 is released.

I had not read this. As I've just come back from //BUILD/ 2015 in SF, I'm glad you brought this to light in this thread. I only wish it didn't take this long and this many posts before somebody did so. Wish MS would've made a similar comment.

Given the radical changes coming to win10 and the merging of the desktop OS w/ the Mobile one, I think it's safe to assume that our Windows Phones will also get much more useful in this regard.

Already in the latest Win10 Insiders build (10074) we can see that Windows Defender is now baked into the control panel. Given the comment from MS above, it wouldn't surprise me if we saw much the same type of change to Family Safety.

It is a bummer that we're all affected until Win10 releases and have to mitigate this for the next 3 months or so, but hopefully it will be worth it.

Also agree with the OP.  As it stands Family Safety is broken if you are trying to use it for multiple devices.

There seem to be quite a few threads on this now and in this one someone from Microsoft made this reply:

If you have children in your Microsoft family that sign into more than one device, you may notice that accounts you had previously linked now appear separately in your family roster. We are making this change in preparation of new features coming soon in Windows 10 that will help you manage child accounts across multiple devices in one place. We apologize for any inconvenience—thanks for your patience as we get things ready.

Not sure what to make of this but it suggests family safety might remain broken until Windows 10 is released.

Oh, and check out the wording of the one shred of evidence that the change was intentional -- the notification at the top of the main Family Safety page on my account. It says:

If you’ve linked your kids’ accounts to manage their settings together, you’ll now need to manage their accounts separately for each device. 

As if it's my fault for "linking" my kids' accounts! I never "linked" my kid's accounts. They've always been linked by virtue of the fact that they were for the same child.

Unbelievable.