Instant messaging is great, but is it secure? Instant messaging is a simple, fast and effective way to communicate, but it is also and easy way for children to talk to dangerous individuals, for employees to waste time on and lower company productivity and a low-level security means of communicating. What do your employees, children or spouse use it for? The forth-mentioned programs above are programs that can enhance and secure your chat experience!

You can now monitor, secure or restrict all chat activity done through instant messenger programs such as MSN, Yahoo!, AOL instant messengers, ICQ and many other chat programs. For example with ChatBlocker allows you to moderate chat sessions on your PC. With ChatBlocker equipped, you can create sessions, which will allow or disallow chatting on AOL, AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Trillian, and more! ChatBlocker uses advanced technology and hotkey / password protection, which help prevent the program from being tampered with. ChatBlocker can also log BOTH sides of chat!

Net Nanny’s Chat Monitor is designed for the responsible adult who is concerned about child safety in chat rooms and instant messaging. The software records conversations, notifies you with real-time email alerts (a feature that competing software don’t have) of possible dangerous situations and lets you restrict access to chats and instant messengers!

So ChatBlocker and Chat Monitor offer obvious benefits in the areas of monitoring and filtering, however, none in security and privacy once instant messenger has been activated.

CypherGuard for MSN messenger similarly adds strong encryption and privacy to MSN Messenger. However, CypherGuard for Windows is a proven stand-alone messenger application with Mercury Prime’s signature encryption with chat and file transfer features are included.

As you can see there are a number of programs related to instant messengers that can put you in control of your chat experience, however, the same programs can jeopardize your privacy and security.