Child internet safety is an issue that isn’t going away, and nor should it. It was the subject of discussion again on Tuesday’s Woman’s Hour (listen here: BBC Radio 4, 23:00 minutes), which featured Time Loughton, Children’s Minister and co-chair of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS).
We were pleased that Tim Loughton recognised TalkTalk as being the only broadband company which offers a service for parents to protect all the devices in their home, saying that “TalkTalk has led the way” with HomeSafe. He also echoed Ed Vaizey’s call for ‘assertive intervention’ from other ISPs.
The Radio 4 programme expressed some strong feelings, asking why ISPs are allowed to stand idly by while children roam around “unprotected”. The presenter made an analogy: a UK cinema wouldn’t let a twelve year-old in to see The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, so why should ISPs let children expose themselves to the goriest content that the internet has to offer?
We’ve always believed that as one of the UK’s largest broadband providers we have a responsibility to help make the internet safer for our customers and provide them with simple and easy tools to enable them to protect themselves and their families online. That’s why we introduced HomeSafe, the UK’s first network level parental control service, free of charge for all TalkTalk customers.
However, as Tim Loughton also pointed out, there is no silver bullet when it comes to internet safety and there are many different groups, which does include industry but also includes charities and parents who especially have a key role to play in supporting their children. This was something which was echoed in the discussion we had at a recent Guardian roundtable debate on the same topic.
No technical solution alone is able to solve the issue of child internet safety, but we do think HomeSafe is a good start. And we’ll continue to evolve it as we go along with the aim of making sure its as simple and easy as possible for parents to use.
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