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This article originally appeared as a Macworld Daily Reader iPad exclusive and is now available on Macworld.com for your enjoyment.

Your home may be crammed with Macs and computing devices, but if you’re like a lot of other households, you have a central “family” Mac. This is the computer located in a high traffic area such as the living room, kitchen, or den. Each family member has access to this Mac and uses it for everyday tasks: checking email, having a quick FaceTime chat with a far-off friend or relative, coordinating calendars, accessing recipes, streaming music to AirPlay devices around the home, and “looking it up on the Internet.”

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Although you can configure this Mac so that it has just a single account, you can make it more enjoyable for each member of your family to use (and easier for you to control) by creating a separate user account for each family member. Do this and everyone has a place to put their stuff, plus you have the power to control exactly what each user can do with the Mac.

Configuring Users & Groups

To create accounts on your Mac, launch System Preferences. If you’re running Lion, select the Users & Groups preference. On a Snow Leopard-or-earlier Mac, choose the Accounts preference. Click the lock icon at the bottom of the window and, when prompted, enter your administrator’s password and click the Unlock button. You’re now ready to add a new account.

You do this by clicking the plus (+) button at the bottom of the user list. In the sheet that appears, enter the full name for the user you’re creating the account for (Susie Jones, for example), an account name (susie), a password (don’t use the same password for each account you create), and a password hint if you like.

From the New Account pop-up menu choose the kind of account you’d like to create. Your choices are Administrator, Standard, Managed With Parental Controls, Sharing Only, and Group. They break down this way:

An Administrator account can control most of the Mac’s functions, including installing software, creating new accounts, changing passwords, and modifying and deleting a variety of files. This is the account you should have, but not one you should create for a child.
A Standard account can operate the Mac normally but doesn’t have the kind of control that an administrator account has—a standard user can’t install software or create accounts, for example. The standard account isn’t a perfect compromise. On the one hand it does prevent this user from making the kind of changes that can muck up the Mac. But it can also prompt those mid-day “Mom, I can’t get on the network!” calls that require an administrator's password to troubleshoot.
Managed With Parental Controls is the kind of account you would set up for a child or someone who’s brand-new to the Mac or computers in general (see “For the Children” below). With Parental Controls (which we’ll discuss later) an administrator can severely limit what a user can do as well as monitor that person’s actions.
You’re unlikely to need either a Sharing Only or Group account on your family Mac. The Sharing Only account is one you create so that a remote user can access files you’ve chosen to share on the computer. A Group account is a special account that can be used by a subset of users who already have an account set up on the Mac—Dad, Mom, and Jackie, for example, but not the toddling twins, Lex and Jason.

Parental Controls

When discussing managing accounts on a family Mac, you’re almost always talking about using OS X’s built-in parental controls in one way or another. Parental controls allow you to limit the Mac in a variety of useful ways.

Once you’ve created an account managed with parental controls, ensure that the Allow User To Administer This Computer option found in the Users & Groups/Accounts window is not enabled. Obviously, you’ve imposed parental controls so that you’re in charge of the Mac, rather than your ten-year-old. With the Enable Parental Controls option enabled, click the Open Parental Controls button. The Parental Controls window will appear.

Within this window you see five tabs—Apps, Web, People, Time Limits, and Other. Within the Apps tab you have three options—Use Simple Finder, Limit Applications, and Allow User To Modify The Dock.

Apps When you enable Use Simple Finder within the Apps tab the person using this account will have more limited access to the Finder. The Finder’s menu bar has fewer commands and the Dock bears only a My Applications folder, Documents folder, Shared folder, and Trash icon (along with any currently running applications). Items within these folders are presented in icon view and can be launched with a single click. There’s no option to view the contents of the Mac’s hard drive and no Go menu for navigating to other locations on the Mac. To expose the full Finder, the user needs an administrator’s password. This is an excellent setting for young children or users with simple needs who are brand new to the Mac.

Limit Applications lets you do just that (see “Limited for Your Protection”). Within Lion you can filter App Store applications by rating (Up To 9+, for example) as well as enable or disable specific applications (allow Pages, for instance, but not DVD Player). By default, users with these controlled accounts are not allowed to modify the Dock. Enable this final option to allow dock modification.

Web The Web tab provides three options—Allow Unrestricted Access To Websites, Try To Limit Access To Adult Websites Automatically, and Allow Access To Only These Websites. The first option is a very bad idea for children, but fine for older-though-inexperienced (but not easily offended) users. The second option uses the filters built in to the Mac OS to limit access to adult content. (Click a Customize button below this option to add specific acceptable websites—sites devoted to breast cancer research, for example—and specifically disallow others that Apple’s filters don’t catch.) Select the last option—Allow Access To Only These Websites—and the person using the managed account will be able to visit only a handful of kid-friendly websites. However, you can add other sites by clicking the Plus (+) button at the bottom of the list of sites, choosing Add Bookmark, and in the sheet that appears, entering a website’s name and address.

Apple’s Internet filters are baked into the Mac OS, so they work with a variety of Web browsers. They’re also intelligent. Rather than blocking websites based on a blacklist of specific sites, websites are filtered based on their page content and structure. Sites will also be blocked if the website has voluntarily identified itself as being adult-oriented in nature using one of a couple of rating systems. But these filters aren’t perfect. If a site has little text or the text it has is in an uncommon language, it could slip by Apple’s filters. If, by examining the logs of a controlled user, you discover inappropriate sites among the log of visited sites, you can add them to the list of blocked sites or you can turn to a third-party security and filtering package.

Likewise, if a site uses SSL encryption (look for addresses that begin with https), the Internet filters won’t work. Under Lion, a Parental Controls window will appear when a person using a controlled account attempts to access secure websites. This window allows those with an administrator password to load the listed sites. If you don’t have such a password, click Cancel, the window disappears, and the browser stays on the current page. Regrettably, some of these websites are simply links to advertising sites so this window can be a common sight when an account has been configured to filter Internet content (see “Ad Links”).

People The People tab is where you both allow or deny access to Mail and iChat as well

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