We’ve always believed we have a responsibility to help improve online safety for our millions of customers. That’s why I’m proud that today TalkTalk has launched HomeSafe, the UK’s first network level broadband security service.
I often hear from our customers that they couldn’t imagine living without the internet but they also tell me they worry about the risks, especially parents who are concerned about the sort of things their children might have access to online.
This is especially important now that children are regularly using devices like smartphones, and not just the main family PC, to access the internet. Our research found that 33% of children aged 12-17 use their mobile phones to surf social networking sites and 29% use it to instant message when at home.
We think HomeSafe can really help with this. HomeSafe is built into our network so it protects every device using the TalkTalk broadband connection, whether that’s a laptop, PC, smartphone, iPod Touch or Nintendo Wii. With HomeSafe, parents will be able to easily select categories that they wish to filter out from their internet – such as pornography, drugs or gambling – and apply this filter to the whole home. It also has a Homework Time feature that allows parents to block social networking and gaming sites at specified times, while still allowing access to educational sites. Finally, its Virus Alerts feature means customers can choose to block access to websites that are infected with malware.
We’ve invested significant time in testing the product with parents to ensure that it is a quick and simple as possible to use; it takes less than a minute for a basic set-up and is now available free for all TalkTalk customers.
And if you’d like to see how it works, then click here to try our interactive demo.
Of course, there’s no silver bullet when it comes to internet safety and its really important that parents talk to their children about what they are doing online. To help with this, we’ve also launched a brand new online safety hub with lots of useful information about protecting yourself online. But we do think HomeSafe is the most comprehensive and effective internet security product available right now, give it a try and let me know what you think; we’re keen to get feedback so we can evolve and improve the service as we go.
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Tim M
I don’t use the HomeSafe service, but as I understand it, as a TalkTalk customer my web requests will still be replayed as part of providing the service to other TalkTalk customers.
Is this service the reason that when I post to twitter, it complains that I’m posting the same message twice?
And the reason why my posting of a comment on a blog sometimes results in the comment being posted twice?
And why the REST calls a web-app I use are played twice (meaning some data items are created twice or updated twice etc) ?
I’m suddenly getting nervous about bidding on ebay or similar (esp “buy it now”) in case I end up buying more than I intended.
Can you explain what the url scanner does (does it execute HEAD requests or the original GET/POST etc, does it replay the cookies that went with the original query, is there any whitelist facility in it) and how you plan to avoid issues with side-effects of your duplication of web requests and the resultant state changes?
TalkTalk Blog Team
Hi Tim, this isn’t anything to do with HomeSafe but we suggest you visit our Member’s Forum http://www.talktalkmembers.com/forums/ where you might be able to find some help with this.”
Andrew Powell
I have to admit I am someone who worked in TalkTalk (I left for a new challenge) and have seen this in action and it did surprise me at how well the solution worked. It is good to see a company trying to give control to parents and if people realised at how easy it is for kids to access inappropriate material tools like this can help extremely well.
When I was working for TT I was pleased that a company like TalkTalk had taken on the concerns of parents, and this was shown in Chanel 4 Sex education show when other compannies including rivals to TalkTalk did not want to know. This solution is something TalkTalk should be proud off in leading the way.