We all worry about our kids and how they use the Internet. Thanks to a safety filter application called littleye, however, a lot of our worries and fears are now taken care of.

Put together by a community of parents and teachers, littleye takes the concept of existing online safety filters on step further.

The very fact that it’s parents and teachers who have put the service together is a great starting place – after all, it’s who our kids will spend most of their childhood learning from.

What is littleye?

The best way to describe littleye is in the company’s own words:

“littleye is a virtual fence around safe websites that have been reviewed and approved by our community of parents and teachers. Kids can surf the Internet, but only within that virtual fence of a trusted safe list of websites.”

So it’s like letting your kids play in your virtual backyard – they have the freedom of playing but still within eyesight of us. If we think their playtime is getting out of hand, we can call them back indoors.

While you can do this with other safety filters, littleye separates itself by having some cool extra features for parents to use.

More Ways to Keep Our Kids Safe Online

Because littleye is a collaboration between parents and teachers, much of the legwork that other filters require has already been taken care of for you. You can pretty much open your account and you’re good to go from the start. So what are some of the key features?

• Online monitoring from any location means as long as you have an Internet connection, you can see what your kids are viewing. This lets you either approve or filter that site.

• Time limits for both sites and daily use make sure your kids aren’t wasting all their time online and leave room for other activities.

• Customized and pre-set website filters let you approve your own sites or choose from tens of thousands of littleye-approved sites.

• Keyword filters that make sure your kids can’t search for any questionable keywords, or find adult sites that use keyword masking to hide their real content (think searching for Snow White leading to a porn site because it uses this term to trick web browsers).

The filter itself is an application that you can download for either Windows or Mac systems. There’s even an iPhone application for monitoring regardless if your location isn’t anywhere near a computer.

As the web becomes more useful for kids for personal and school use, so the risk of viewing unwanted websites goes up too. With littleye activated, the chances of this happening are greatly reduced.

INCREDIBLE SPECIAL OFFER

Until the end of August 2009, you can grab a free lifetime subscription! After that it’s either $4.95 per month or $49 for an annual subscription. You can find out more (including a nifty set of videos) on the littleye website, or follow them on Twitter if you’re on there.

Danny Brown is a business branding and social media consultant, and the father to a beautiful little girl. He is also the founder of the 12for12k Challenge, a social media-led charity initiative. Say hello to him on Twitter.