In the previous blog I outlined a number of top selling Content Filtering products and some of the things I felt were flaws that diminished their effectiveness. In this blog I'll explain what tool we did eventually select.
First, here's a quick summary of some of the goals my wife and I established when trying to balance my children's freedoms, ease of use, and practical yet safe Internet usage. We wanted to:
- Prevent access to inappropriate web content yet I didn't want to use an inherently flawed content filter nor attempt to pre-authorize each and every possible site my child might legitimately need to use for school work or for safe and fun entertainment.
- Mentor, and monitor, our children on a safe way to use email, chat, and instant messenging tools as well as profiles on community sites.
- Have a program that didn't require constant upgrades in order to monitor activity with every new instant messenging tool or community site our children might use.
- Allow sufficient freedom that if our child understood the rules of safe Internet usage that they might be able to surf to new sites and interact with their friends online without us physically watching their every move.
After doing some research we settled on eBlaster from SpectorSoft. SpectorSoft offers several different 
programs / versions but the premise is the generally the same -- capture the user's activity either by logging every keystroke made by the user or by taking screen captures at regular intervals. We selected eBlaster because:
- We could install it yet it was virtually impossible to detect on the computer or disable.
- It captured each and every keystroke made by the person using the computer. And I mean everything. It doesn't matter what application the person is using it captures everything they type and places it into a very nice log file organized by user, time and the application they were using. So if they typed their username and password into their MySpace account we can see in the log that they typed the MySpace URL first, pressed enter and then typed in their username and password and pressed enter. Every action is captured.
- It captures BOTH sides of the instant messenging chat sessions for Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Skype, and many others. We can see in the log the back and forth chatter labeled by their usernames from every individual in the chat session.
- It can be configured to immediately forward any email sent from the PC to us.
- It can be configured to immediately email us if certain keywords (naughty words or personal information) is ever typed.
- It can be configured to email a summary and a detailed log of the previous day's activity to one or more email accounts.
It's really been the best solution we've found so far. The first thing we did was to tell our son that we installed the software and how it worked. We never hid the fact that we were capturing everything he did on the PC. We have always been completely open and honest about it. We then explained our expectations and outlined our Internet safety rules. We left the PC in his bedroom and began to read the logs on a daily basis.
What have we learned so far? Well despite the fact that he knew we were able to read in the log his activity from the previous day he still struggled to stay out of trouble.
SoapBox == ON I don't care how much you love your child, how much you trust them, or how perfect you think they are, or how honest you feel they are… I'll let you in on a little secret -- we're all born sinners, no one teaches your child to lie about who ate the last cookie, no one teaches your child to fib about brushing their teeth. It's their native sin nature. And although some may have come to know the Lord personally that doesn't mean they will stop sinning. So do yourself and your child a favor and be involved in their life. It doesn't mean watching them 24x7 or monitoring they're every move. That's impossible, impractical, and doesn't build a confident child. We certainly don't read the log on a daily basis (it's very boring, 99% of the conversations between "tweens" is about NOTHING). But it maintains a level of accountability, transparency, and safety while they're under our roof. Even more importantly is to talk to them and pray with them regularly so that they feel comfortable coming to you when they run into trouble or face a difficult situation. Simply monitoring them with software is not parenting. SoapBox == OFF
Back to what we learned reviewing the logs. (Note that it didn't take long for him to become comfortable with the logging and "forget" it was there.) We discovered that our darling and near perfect child (or so we thought) was interfacing with strangers from 10 different U.S. states and Great Britain, he was getting back up in the middle of the night to use the PC and was then too sleepy at school, he had made friends with people that frequently used foul language, and most disturbingly he was portraying himself to be someone he was not -- someone older, more mature, or overly confident. Behind the façade of the PC he was simply not himself, he had created a new 'online' persona.
We're pleased to report that while there have been difficult moments, times when we had to show him the log and discuss some troubling items we found there, overall it's been a true blessing and my son might even agree. We did eventually have to move the PC out of his room and into the kitchen. But now, after 3 - 4 years of use, the logging has become routine and we rarely, if ever, review it. He's developed very safe habits for using the web effectively and he even mentors his friends on Internet safety. We realize that he'll leave for college in a couple of years and he'll likely experiment with the darker side of the Internet. But hopefully with the firm foundation we've set he will not stray far from it.
Final note: I came across this site, Monitoring Software Reviews, and it rated WebWatcher as slightly superior to eBlaster. I plan to download a trial version soon to see if I like it better.
I'll wrap this topic up with 2 more blog entries. One will summarize a few tips and lists some helpful websites for more information. The other will contain a few of my favorite real-life stories (some funny, some serious) that we've experienced with our children's Internet usage.
Curtis S