Inside Internet Filtering

Often when new people find out that I am the Chief Technology Officer of an Internet filtering company that I also founded they ask me how it all started.  Here is a brief run down in bullet form.

• Summer of 1999 my brother and I started SafeBrowse.com.  A local Internet Service Provider offering dialup connections in the Atlanta area, with content filtering baked right in.  Our key differentiator was to allow our customers to choose what would be filtered, this had never been done before.
• In 2000, we linked onto MCI’s national dialup backbone and began offering the SafeBrowse.com service nationally.
• In February of 2001 we quit or jobs and went full-time with SafeBrowse.com.  We had a company that wanted us to develop a browser that was pre-filtered for public access Internet kiosks.  They went bankrupt shortly after we quit our jobs.
• Needing to make ends meet we were approached by another ISP that was offering filtered dialup and wanted to use our customizable technology.  We launched a Virtual ISP program allowing others to brand our technology with their name.
• For the next few years we built the Virtual ISP program up to about 70 ISPs only to realize that dialup was going to have a short life span.  We needed to shift the company away from dialup if it was to survive.
• In 2003 we decided to take the filtering that we were doing well and make it so anybody on any connection could use it.  This was accomplished by Safe Eyes, which was actually written by my brother Shane and myself.
• Through 2004 and 2005 we continued to work on Safe Eyes, and in 2005 Safe Eyes was rated as the #1 parental control utility by Consumer Reports.
• In 2006 Safe Eyes went on to receive PC Magazine’s Editors’ Choice Award for the first time.
• In 2007 we did a limited release of our corporate level filtering appliance that would harness the same cloud-based Internet filtering infrastructure we had created for Safe Eyes.  The EtherShield was officially launched in 2008.
• Also in 2007 we changed the name of the company from SafeBrowse.com to InternetSafety.com.
• In August of 2007 Safe Eyes was selected as a vendor in the free filter program in Australia.  I led the deployment of Safe Eyes for the Australian government.
• 2009 kicked off with the release of Safe Eyes Mobile, the first Internet filter for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
• In Mid 2009 InternetSafety.com, in partnership with McAfee, launched McAfee Family Protection
• Late in 2009 InternetSafety.com, in partnership with McAfee and Verizon, launches Family Protection to all Verizon ISP customers.
• January 2010 InternetSafety.com launches Safe Eyes 6 at the Consumer Electronics Show.  Safe Eyes 6 is the first to allow show-by-show filtering of online TV based on standard ratings.

So I now find myself nearly a decade down the road having participated in the design and development of ISP level, consumer level, and business level Internet filtering products.  Safe Eyes has recieved more acclaim from leading publications that any parental control application in history, and I look forward to doing the same with EtherShield.

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