Doug & Others, Internet Safety Question – Advice Needed, Please

I hope some others chime in. We have pc’s, but this has been an ongoing problem for me. We have Safe Eyes (have had it for two years now) and it’s okay. I finally called the other day after it was blocking some random things hubby was looking up and then not blocking obvious things we want to block (I was testing it and these were not things my children found – shocking because I thought I had all the correct boxes checked to avoid porn and such, but that wasn’t cutting it at all!). The customer service agent was helpful and showed me where to enter key words in to a section to make sure things were blocked, but I’m now having problems with pinterest not working properly on the computers with Safe Eyes. I emailed customer service yesterday because I didn’t have time to talk and haven’t heard back yet.

I don’t think there is any one perfect solution to the blocking the yuckiness of the internet. I am happy enough with Safe Eyes I guess because it expired on Sunday and I renewed it. I don’t have any other better option at this point, but it’s $50/yr. I know that Homeschool Buyer’s Co-op is having a group buy starting next week on it, but I couldn’t wait a week to renew. I found a $10 renewal coupon code online so that helped. I guess I can’t put a price on my children losing there innocence seeing porn online can I?

One other thing is you can block certain websites or only allow certain websites as well as block just certain activities (ie no YouTube or no online chat rooms or no social networking, etc). It’s really user friendly and for the most part it’s been fine, it’s just now annoying that pinterest doesn’t work and that irks my daughter who loves it a LOT! Maybe it’s a sign that she needs to have less computer time???

If you have any questions about it, I can try to answer them. Not sure if this is the info you were looking for. One other thing, I tried to implement Microsoft Live Family Safety because it’s free and could never get it to work on our main desktop. I think that is a viable free option, but even after talking to MS customer service, I got no where and they wanted to charge me $100 to remotely access my computer and figure out the problem. I know the MS won’t work for you, but maybe it will for others with a pc.

Melissa

Oh how sad, thanks for sharing about Pinterest – nothing is safe, is it?

Safe search does help with Google image search too. Bing has a similar setting as well that is worth checking, though I believe it may be on by default.

But if those aren’t set to a safe mode, then they are probably one of the mostly likely ways for our kids to stumble on things they shouldn’t see from simply searching on what seem to be totally harmless phrases. So either checking the safe search mode now and then or limiting visual search through OpenDNS is probably prudent.

Hello –

I was hoping to revive the internet safety thread again.  Does anyone have any good recommendation on what is working for their family?  I would love to have my children be able to work on the computer without the constant dread of what they may accidentally bring up.  In the past I have heard of people liking K9 – the older free version, but doing research I am reading about some not liking the newer versions.  I would love to hear about free or lower cost options that others like….but ultimately am willing to pay a reasonable fee for a good filter which doesn’t block things unnecessarily. 

Thanks in advance for your input!

Thank you for your response.  I will look into that one. Yes, I guess there is not going to be a perfect solution. I agree  that something that blocks well and has some good control options is worth having some occasional extra blocking.  Thanks again!

After I was *happy* with SafeEyes and raved about it, I didn’t end up renewing again.  It was becoming so frusterating to the kids & DH, plus I was still able to pull up questionable things that I had blocked.

We now have the Microsoft parental controls from Family Safety inplace on the computer and it’s actually worse because I have them pretty much locked down.  There is NO safe search engine.  I actually found one – KidRex.org (it passed all my questionable content requests) that worked great, but it’s powered by Google so I can’t block Google without blocking the use of KidRex and I have Google blocked.  It would be fine if the kids didn’t know how to just type Google in the address bar, but my kids are older so they can easily get around it.

So for now, they have time limited that is only on the honor system since Windows 7 doesn’t enable time enforcement on the parental controls and if they want to go any website, they have to type it in and can’t use a search engine.

I think the internet is such a pain with kids.  I honestly wish we didn’t have the internet, but I know it’s helpful and wonderful even those it’s awful and evil.  It’s just really hard with kids to make sure you protect them from the bad.

So I’m of no help, but this is where I am at this point.  I honestly don’t know what we’ll do next.

We have used K9 Web Protection for about 8 years now and I really like it.  It’s free, also.

Someone mentioned Pinterest having lots of inappropriate Pins.  I don’t know if it because of K9, but I have never seen that!