IMSafer Brings New Protection for Online Kids and Teens on Windows Vista & Macs

IMSafer (TM) of Houston, Texas, today announced the support of both the Windows Vista and Mac OS X platforms by IMSafer's flagship product aimed at providing greater levels of protection to children and teens who chat online via instant messenger services.

"Our customer base has grown dramatically since our launch, and we want to make sure we are supporting as many operating systems as we can," said David Giffin, IMSafer's Chief Architect and co-founder. "Protecting kids is too important to put off and given the expected rapid adoption of Windows Vista, and the growth of the Mac platform along with its huge installed base in schools, we worked hard to get these updates done as soon as possible."

Windows Vista Support

IMSafer supports the Windows Vista Family Settings parental controls API and is a Windows Vista Launch Partner.

"IMSafer supports our new parental control features -- such as Web filtering, time management and program restrictions -- by providing a unique set of services that help protect children and teens who use instant messaging," said David George, Director of Family Safe Computing at Microsoft Corp. "Having IMSafer as a launch partner for Windows Vista allows us to offer our customers an additional layer of security beyond our already robust feature set."

IMSafer has updated their Basic Service to include support for the Windows Vista operating system. To further support Microsoft in its effort to protect children, IMSafer has also built a downloadable wizard for easing the setup of the Windows Vista parental controls. The Windows Vista parental control setup wizard will be freely downloadable from both IMSafer and Microsoft. The IMSafer service will also log data to the Windows Vista parental controls control panel.

Mac OS X Support

Due to overwhelming requests from the IMSafer community, and a desire to support the education computing infrastructure, IMSafer has added support for Mac OS X v. 10.4. The Mac version supports all of the major IM platforms (Yahoo!, MSN, AOL) and also supports iChat.

How does IMSafer work?

IMSafer is a proactive tool for parents that uses language analysis to indicate inappropriate online relationships with children. Parents are notified within 90 seconds by email about potential trouble wherever their child is when engaged in an online chat. The IMSafer service also allows parents to leave feedback on people they believe are having inappropriate conversations with their child. This feedback allows IMSafer to be even more proactive in alerting parents about potentially inappropriate online relationships.

Pricing and Availability:

The Basic Service from IMSafer can be downloaded for free.

About IMSafer

IMSafer is based in Houston, Texas. We started with a simple plan: to rethink the problem of protecting kids online. "Simple," "easy to use" and "effective" are our guiding principles. The products for protecting children online are overwhelming for parents, hard to use, and require too much work on the part of the parents. We started with a blank sheet, used new technologies, and have created a really great service for parents. Each of us had at least one conversation with a guidance counselor who said, "if only you could use your powers for good." This is our chance.
"IM Safe" is a trademark of IMSafer, Inc. Other names used may be registered by their respective owners.