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Anybody who believes that their children are safe from harm when unmonitored online is either ignorant or severely misinformed. Regardless of any of our views on censorship, we can all agree that there’s more online than children need to access. That’s why my family uses Safe Eyes.

I have a computer setup so that my 6 year old daughter can get online and play some of her favorite Flash games. Everything else is blocked - everything else. Safe Eyes lets me configure it to be so. When she’s older, she’ll have more access (since she’ll need it for school), but her little brother will be using a more limited account. Safe Eyes gives us peace of mind knowing exactly what our children are able to access online.

The new version of Safe Eyes was released today, but I’ve been using a pre-release copy for a couple of weeks. There’s a new feature we are exited about: Email Blocking.

It’s wonderful. I setup an email address for her and setup her email client with addresses of family and friends. Then I configured Safe Eyes to only allow email from those people. If email from anybody else comes through, it gets deleted.

There is some administrative overhead with the use of this feature. Anytime she wants a new email contact, she has to ask me to add her friend’s address to the list of approved addresses. For me, this overhead is no problem at all - especially considering that I can make the change from any computer with internet access.

So my daughter is thrilled that she can send emails, my parents (and inlaws, and grandparents) are thrilled that they can hear from her (directly) on a regular basis, my wife is thrilled because the kids aren’t on her computer, and I’m thrilled because my little girl is geeking out on email.

And we’re all thrilled because she’s safe when she’s behind the keyboard.