Internet for Kids

For several years in the frum community there has been much debate and discussion regarding Internet usage for both children and adults.

Rabbi Berger has instituted rules for members of his shul. Rabbi Lowenthal of TA, has presented on the subject to the Baltimore community. Allow me to share my internet set-up in my home.

First we will start with Internet usage.

I have a program on each of my two computers called SafeEyes. This product is sold by InternetSafey.com. The program itself has various control methodologies. The way I set this up is as follows. I have three “accounts”. One is the administrator account. The second is for me and Rikki, we will call it the “parents” account. The third is the “kids” account.

The parents account is set to allow all sites unless they are characterized as pornography, nudity, violence, hacking or some other objectionable characterization.

The kids account is set to ban all websites, unless the site is in a list maintained by the administrator. So the kids can go to Nickjr.com, NFL.com, ESPN.com, sesamestreet.com, etc. But that is it. If the kids want to go to another site they need to ask the administrator to add it to the list of allowed sites.

The administrator of course can go to any site. One might want to give the admin password to the lady of the house. I don’t do that, but I probably should.

There are many other functionalities in the program that I don’t use, but may be useful. The include usage reporting, time limits, and program blocking.

The program cannot be uninstalled unless an uninstall code is obtained from the company by the administrator. I have tried to get around this, but could not.

The cost is $50 per year for up to four licenses. I got it for $35 for the year as a renewal.

Now on to email.

I do not use safeyes for email blocking, because it can only be applied to email received in an email client like MS Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird. It cannot be applied to web based email.

I recently signed up for Zoobuh. I did significant research on this and found that this is the best economical solution that will work with the SafeEyes protocol explained above. I set this up for now, that all email sent to my kids addresses are first sent to my address for approval, unless the sender’s email address is in the whitelist that only I can maintain. If the sender is not in the whitelist, the email is sent to my e-mail account. I can then approve or deny the email. If I approve the e-mail, it is then sent to the kids account. Additionally, I can whitelist or blacklist the sender.

The cost is a dollar per month per email address. So it will cost me for now $24 a year for Doug and Violet to have e-mail.