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Thanks to Susan for the kind words and importing knowledge to other moms out there.

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Dr. Laura’s internationally syndicated radio program is aired on stations around the country, heard on Sirius/XM Radio, and streamed on the Internet and podcast via StreamLink. Through the show she offers advice for personal, work and familial problems with a focus on morals, values and ethics. She also writes a monthly column for NewsMax and a daily blog, and posts videos weekly on The Dr. Laura YouTube Channel.

“Parents have an obligation to shield their children from disturbing as well as potentially damaging online content, from websites that deal with pornography, gambling or drug use to the latest episode of ‘Desperate Housewives’,” Schlessinger said. “Having a tool like Safe Eyes makes it possible to maintain a wholesome online environment and enforce strong family values.”

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The site calls our latest offering “very easy to install, configure, and run” and added that the software is “ahead of the curve” when it comes to video management. But don’t take our word for it:

One of our favorite features of the software is how the control panel is set up. It’s an activity oriented set up which makes it very intuitive. You want to filter web content? Click on the “Web” tab. Want to set up alerts for whenever a child attempts to circumvent a web filter or block? Click the “Instant Alerts” tab. Worth noting as well is that the “Music” tab also allows you to block explicit content from being downloaded on iTunes, but iTunes also has its own parental controls as well. That said, it’s nice to have the feature built into SafeEyes because there’s a lot to keep track of with children and computer use and being able to control multiple facets of your little ones’ computer use from one place is definitely a plus!
—Digital Shepherds

You can read the whole review here.

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Safe Eyes Mobile provides mobile internet filtering for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and very soon for the iPad as well. Will you be purchasing an iPad, and if so, are you going to replace the Safari browser with a filtered browser?

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One of our primary goals in revamping the Safe Eyes reporting system was to make the information presented in the reports easier to read and digest quickly, as most parents do not have tons of time to pour over online activity reports. To accomplish this we have categorized the data according to the corresponding activity, and prioritized the data so that parents can instantly see the most relevant information to their child’s online activities.

As you can see above, the information regarding this user’s web site activity is displayed according to times of day and visually displays what time period has the most frequent Internet use. Thus, parents can easily see what time their kids are getting online the most, and regulate that through our time controls if necessary. The report also shows top searches and top sites visited.

The videos pane of the Activity Report shows what videos have been watched, what videos have been blocked, and if they have a rating, what rating the show falls under. The visual display quickly alerts parents to what type of video content their child is accessing and attempting to access, providing opportunities for teachable moments.

In addition to viewing the Activity Reports through the Safe Eyes interface, parents can elect to receive either daily or weekly Activity Summaries through email, which provide a condensed version of the full Activity Reports.

These improvements empower parents with the information they need to be responsible digital parents and help their children discover the Internet safely.

Safe Eyes 6 is currently available at InternetSafety.com.

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While Mayer’s interview is likely to be noted for some other things said which Mayer will likely regret, we found his points on the impact of pornography on his generation to be rather salient:

Internet pornography has absolutely changed my generation’s expectations. How does (porn) not affect the psychology of having a relationship with somebody? It’s got to.
John Mayer

Mayer added that his pornography consumption has made sex less satisfying for him and has made it harder to connect to the woman that he is with and less likely to seek out meaningful relationships with women.

Robert Pattinson of the wildly successful Twilight saga, who apparently objected to having to appear with several near-naked models for a Details cover shoot, also wondered about the impact of the prevalence and availability of porn on his generation.

Pattinson in describing his aversion to the shoot lamented that today, as opposed to the eighties, that porn is “everything” and “everywhere,” and that it has lost aspects he described as “quaint” and even respectful.

Many groups, from the feminist left to the Christian right, have connected constant pornography consumption to sexual crimes or deviant behavior, but what Mayer and Pattinson both inherently realize as members of younger generations is that the effect of pornography goes far beyond such worst-case scenarios. The increasingly apparent and felt impact is that the ubiquitous nature of online pornography is changing the face of sex and relationships in much the same way that social networking and media are changing interpersonal interaction: substituting endlessness for intimacy.

What do you think? Will the availability and ubiquity of pornography in the digital age substantially alter human relationships and behavior?

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His blog, Keeping Kids Safe Online, recently featured Safe Eyes Mobile after both his boys received iPod Touches for Christmas. A lot of parents don’t realize that iPod Touches have WiFi connections and can connect to the Internet.

Here are his comments:

Installing it was easy.  There were a few screens of setup I had to do on each iPod and it required me to create a master administrative account so that I alone could change settings.

During setup I chose the types of site content I wanted filtered out (like adult, violence, hate, etc.).  Naturally I checked most of the options only to find that it filtered EVERY site out, including most news sites and even National Geographic Kids.  Lesson learned – you can’t go crazy with blocking things out or it will block everything. The nice thing about the app is that I can change settings as we go along.  When a site is blocked that shouldn’t be, I can add it to the “allow” list.  If a bad site slips through the filters I can add it to the “block” list.

The app will obviously have to evolve as my kids use it which means, like any filtering/monitoring software, it will require my time to maintain and adjust it.  I’ve said it before and I’ll continue to say it, when it comes to keeping your kids safe online, there is no magic application that you set once and walk away from.  If you want the software to do its job you have to put some time in.

Micheal makes a great point here: while we’ve done everything we can to make installation as easy as possible, filters do need a bit of customization to make them work just right for the person they are intended to protect. It’s also true that no filter can work optimally without steady parental involvement, which is why we say that parents are not included with our products.

You can read Micheal’s full review on Keeping Kids Safe Online.

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“We don’t know if Tiger Woods struggled with online pornography, but most sex addicts do. It’s often where their habit starts,” said Gross, whose web-based XXXchurch ministry has helped hundreds of thousands of people combat pornography addiction. “You no longer have to surreptitiously buy a porn magazine from a newsstand or go through the embarrassment of renting a porn movie. There are 420 million pages of pornographic material online, and that is fueling the sex addiction problem.”

The National Council on Sex Addiction estimates that 25 million Americans visit cyber-sex sites from one to 10 hours a week, with 18 to 24 million people in the U.S. qualifying as sex addicts. The Internet Filter Review estimates that 25% of all search engine requests are pornography-related, nearly 43% of all Internet users view porn, and there are 1.5 billion peer-to-peer pornography downloads per month.

Gross recommends using an Internet filtering program like InternetSafety.com’s Safe Eyes to protect users from the lure of online sexual content. Safe Eyes allows ‘accountability partners’ such as a spouse, friend, pastor or mentor assigned by an anti-porn advocacy group to block Internet access altogether at specific times such as the highly vulnerable after-midnight hours, check online usage logs for attempts to access sites with sexual content, and receive alerts by phone or email when users attempt to bypass the filter.

Accountability partners can be given administrative control of Safe Eyes so that they can adjust settings and access usage logs from their own computers. Users can be prevented from removing the software from their computers by asking InternetSafety.com to scramble their passwords or by configuring the product to split passwords with accountability partners.

“Any addict needs tools to fight his or her addiction. The use of Safe Eyes to help pornography addicts break the habit has been growing steadily since we introduced the product in 2003,” said InternetSafety.com CEO Forrest Collier. “Intervening in this way can help people avoid the spiraling effects of sexual addiction.”

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Tshaka Armstrong, the driving force behind Digital Shepherds, stopped by our booth at the Consumer Electronics Show, and after learning about Safe Eyes 6 decided to make it one of his top picks from the event.

Read the whole article and check out the video interviews at digitalshepherds.com.

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Safe Eyes 6 includes several new features which will enhance the protection Safe Eyes offers as well as keep parents better informed. Some of the new features include:

• The ability to filter online TV shows and movies according to standard FCC ratings like “R” and “TV-MA”; works on Hulu.com and all major network sites
• Smarter and more meaningful activity reports
• Activity summaries sent through email
• The ability to enable safe-search across all browsers and search engines
• The ability to prevent explicit downloads through iTunes

Check out our preview of Safe Eyes here.

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