Norton Internet Security has thrown their hat in the ring and added parental controls to their Internet Security product. The new set of features allows parents to block websites and newsgroups based on Symantec’s block lists. They also allow parents to add any inappropriate sites to a block list but their implementation of this feature will stymie the efforts of all but the most savvy computer users.

If you look at Norton’s website, you will quickly see that this product is merely a toe in the water of the Parental Control space. Even their own description of the product fails to bill it as much more than low-level filtering software. While we believe that Norton could surely deliver a top-notch piece of monitoring/filtering software if they put their mind to it, this current iteration is very thin on features and leaves a lot to be desired.

Installing Norton Internet Security was much harder than most of the competitors and it made accessing the web a challenge in many cases. All of our testers are very experienced computer users and they had a lot of difficulty with this product. For the average consumer, the difficulty level alone may present too big of an obstacle for this product to receive too much consideration.

If you buy this product, it is our recommendation that you do so for their excellent Firewall and Anti-virus protection and not for the parental controls which were clearly tacked on as an afterthought.