Safe Eyes Reviewer's Comments

Safe Eyes earned our “TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award” because of its ability to safely filter your Internet surfing in an age where people use multiple computers everyday. Safe Eyes is one of the best programs we’ve seen for offering coverage on multiple computers. That’s probably why many businesses and organizations have recently begun turning to Safe Eyes for their Internet filter needs.

Safe Eyes accomplishes this by allowing you to create user profiles and  records of what specific individuals are permitted to view. They house the profiles on their own website so that you can access them from different computers. Your filtering settings need not be confined to one particular software installation like many of the other filtering programs.

This approach makes it much easier to manage filtering needs for multiple people in a family or business. But the true test of a good Internet filter is its effectiveness at blocking offensive sites. Safe Eyes performs admirably in this area. Your site requests, while surfing the Internet, are checked by a database that is regularly updated in order to keep the filtering current.

The Safe Eyes interface is very clean and user-friendly with all of the tools you need to protect your children, monitor their Internet activity and enforce time restraints. There were a few small problems with Safe Eyes that kept it from reaching our top spot in the review. Safe Eyes didn’t perform quite as well in the filtering tests as the top product. This is partly due to a different filtering process. We also observed that Safe Eyes could slow down the browsing process while Safe Eyes processed the target site and reported whether it was acceptable or not. This delay was normally not an issue, but if you have a slow Internet connection, it might be an issue for you because your navigation requests have to go through the Safe Eyes servers and come back to you before it will allow or block a page.

Feature Set:  

Safe Eyes has a lot of great features that extend beyond simply blocking sites. For instance, for any user profile, you can limit the amount of time that the user is allowed to be on the Internet. This is especially useful for people who spend too much time gaming or surfing on the Internet. Restricting access time will help them be more productive with their time. Even more useful, you can designate any part of the day as restricted so that they can only use the Internet at certain times.

The time management feature is easy to configure. Simply select the hours during the day to allow a user to access the Internet. You can customize the schedule for each user and limit the overall time a user can be on the Internet. You also receive regular reports from Safe Eyes about the sites that users have visited and what was said in instant messaging conversations. The latter is especially useful if you worry about your children being confronted by predators on chat or IM.

You can store web logs for each user on your home computer or on the Safe Eyes server. Files on the Safe Eyes server can be accessed from any Internet browser. And you can share your logs with a friend so they can check on what you (as the administrator) are viewing.

If there is a serious problem, you can even receive immediate alerts when someone tries to access a particular forbidden site. You can receive these usage alerts via email, text message and telephone calls so that you can have up-to-date information about a certain user.

This software is missing a few features the top-rated products include like a warning instead of blocking and immediate override of blocks so the administrator can easily override the filter with a password. These features aren’t absolutely essential to filtering, but they would certainly be more convenient for all users if they were included.

Ease of Use:  

When you set up Safe Eyes, you will create an account that resides on the Safe Eyes servers. These can be accessed through any Internet connection, meaning you can change the settings from almost anywhere. You will need to create a unique name for your profile and specify the settings, but after that, Safe Eyes is extremely easy to use.

A help button in each section of the interface answers any questions you may have—this makes the software easy to use without reading a long manual. This is one of our favorite features because, honestly, who wants to consult a manual for little questions and simple troubleshooting?

One of the most frustrating things about using Safe Eyes will be the delay in pulling up a site. The delay comes from the fact that Safe Eyes runs all the URLs you visit through their database before allowing or blocking the site. Your request must be sent and received before being shown. The delay is usually negligible, but could present a greater problem for people who are using slow connections to the Internet.

Ease of Installation:  

We didn’t have any problems during installation and setup. You create the names for all the profiles you need and then manage them through the Internet interface.

 

Filtering Effectiveness:  

Safe Eyes uses a slightly different method than the top 2 products. The program relies more on a database of URLs with restricted content than with keyword analysis. That’s not to say that the program doesn’t take keywords into account, but it does affect how a person can navigate the Internet. For instance, you can search for restricted keywords and the results will come up, but when you try to click on any of the links, the sites will be blocked.

Even though the methods are different, Safe Eyes is still effective at protecting you from unwanted content. Safe Eyes was able to differentiate between similar keywords like “breast” and “chicken breast.” We found that Safe Eyes sometimes overblocked a little, restricting sites that might not have needed it, but the overblocking was mild and won’t be a problem for most people who are concerned about offensive content on the Internet.

Like other Internet filters, Safe Eyes struggles to restrict offensive content if it is entirely in image form or if there is text content that seems okay. Safe Eyes relies on other content clues, so unacceptable images can sometimes sneak through. Nevertheless, Safe Eyes still blocks sites that are known to have offensive images relating to any of the blocking categories, so this won’t be a constant problem.

In addition, Safe Eyes takes into account foreign language sites and the content they provide. If a filtering program focuses exclusively on English keywords, it won’t catch obviously objectionable content on foreign language sites. Fortunately, Safe Eye’s database of sites identifies problem sites in any language and regulates your traffic to them.

Summary:  

Safe Eyes has a lot convenient features to protect your family, organized in an attractive interface. Whether you are using it in a home setting or for a business, Safe Eyes is easily scalable to the number of people you want to protect and monitor. It’s also easy to customize and use from anywhere.