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Xbox LIVE Online Safety Settings

To set Xbox LIVE Online Safety Settings, you must first create an Xbox LIVE membership for your child using their correct date of birth by going to the Social section and then selecting Friends on the Xbox 360 dashboard, which will launch you into the Xbox LIVE membership sign-up process. Once you've completed this brief process, you will be able to manage the following Xbox LIVE features:

Online Gameplay: Before you can play multiplayer games online, you need an Xbox LIVE Gold Family Pack Membership or a standard Xbox LIVE Gold Membership. Once in place, this option allows you to decide whether your child can play Xbox 360 games online. You can also control who your children play with and whether than can engage in text, voice or video communication.

Video Kinect and Kinect Sharing: Video Kinect requires an Xbox LIVE Gold Family Pack Membership or a standard Xbox LIVE Gold Membership, and allows you to video chat over Xbox LIVE with friends and family. Kinect Sharing allows you to upload pictures captured during Kinect gameplay outside of the console to KinectShare.com and then upload them to your social media pages*. These features are automatically blocked for Child profiles, but Online Safety Settings allow parents to control access to these features based on what you feel is appropriate for your family.

*Photo sharing with KinectShare available only with select Kinect games. See KinectShare.com for full details.

Family Programming: Family Programming allows you to disable the display of mature rated games, movies, and content from the Xbox dashboard based on ESRB ratings, Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ratings and the TV Parental Guidelines system.

To access your child's safety and privacy settings:

If you have an Xbox LIVE Gold Family account, you can configure settings for a child account that’s part of your family directly from your Xbox 360 console. For more information on the Xbox LIVE Gold Family Pack, visit Join an Xbox LIVE Gold Family Pack.

Sign into Xbox LIVE using your adult account.
Go to Settings and select Family.
Select the child account you want to manage.
In the Privacy and Online Safety panel, you will see intelligent default settings for Child, Teen and Adult profiles that are applied based on the member’s age. You can review all of these default settings and what you can control here.

If you want to edit the current settings, select Change Settings and then Customize, and make any changes you deem appropriate.

If you don’t have an Xbox LIVE Gold Family account, you can adjust the online safety and privacy settings for your child’s account from Xbox.com.

Go to the My Account page on Xbox.com.
In the upper-right hand corner, click Sign In, and sign in with the Microsoft account of the child whose settings you want to change.
Under Settings and Privacy, you can select Child, Teen or Adult to set intelligent default settings based on age.

Note: You will be prompted for the parental Microsoft account in order to make changes to the child account’s safety settings.
You can easily customize these settings to fit what you and your family consider appropriate.

The table below describes the Xbox LIVE activity settings that you can control:

This setting...	Controls a player's ability to...	Options
Online Gameplay	Decide whether or not a child can connect to Xbox LIVE and play games with other Xbox LIVE players including friends. Only child accounts have this setting.	Allowed Blocked
Accept Friend Requests If set to Blocked, the adult account must approve all friend requests.	Decide whether or not a child can accept Xbox LIVE friend requests without parental approval. Friend requests act like a contact list and also change what information can be seen on Xbox LIVE. Only child accounts have this setting.	Allowed Blocked
Purchasing	Decide whether or not a child can purchase items on Xbox LIVE Marketplace, such as arcade games, game add-ons, and other items. Only child accounts have this setting.	Allowed Blocked
Voice and Text	Decide who to communicate with using voice, text, and game invites.	Everyone Friends Only Blocked
Video Communication	Decide who to interact with using video on Xbox LIVE. Includes Video Kinect and in-game video chat.	Everyone Friends Only Blocked
Web Browsing	Browse websites using Internet Explorer for Xbox	Allowed Blocked

Privacy settings

The table below describes the privacy settings that you can set:

This setting...	Controls...	Options
Profile Sharing	Who can see your Xbox LIVE profile-including personal information, game history, and achievements	Everyone Friends Only Blocked
Kinect Sharing	Whether or not you can upload photos and videos that you take while playing Kinect games to websites or services such as KinectShare.com. You can download, print, and share photos that you upload to KinectShare.com Learn how to share in-game photos and videos.	Allowed Blocked
Social Network Sharing	Whether or not the profile can post to social networks such as Facebook.	Allowed Blocked
Game History	Who can see your game history and achievements	Everyone Friends Only Blocked
Online Status	Who can see what game or application you are currently playing	Everyone
Video Status	Who can see the title of the video you are viewing while connected to Xbox LIVE	Everyone Friends Only Blocked
Friends List	Who can see your friends list	Everyone Friends Only Blocked
Voice Data Collection	Whether Microsoft can collect samples of voice commands spoken when using Kinect. This information will be used to help improve Microsoft speech recognition.	Allowed Blocked

Content settings

The table below describes the online content settings you can set. If you want to control which games can be played and what content can be watched, please see Xbox 360 console parental controls.

This setting...	Controls whether the account...
Family Dashboard	Can receive standard Xbox Dashboard or the Family Dashboard with family Xbox LIVE programming.
Profile Viewing	Can see other people's profiles. A profile includes information about a member's game history and achievements. It can also contain a gamer's motto and personal information that might be inappropriate for children.
Member Content	Can see member-created content on Xbox LIVE. Member content includes images, text, and custom content in games, which might be inappropriate.
Explicit Music	Can play explicit music and music videos on your console and Zune.

Opt-in options

The table below describes marketing settings that you can set:

Xbox Marketing	Don't miss out! Get insider information, including news on games, latest releases, downloadable demos, videos, and other rewards and promotions.
Partner Marketing	Do you want to share your information with our third-party partners (such as game publishers) so that they can communicate with you about their products?