Parents need supervise their children online due to “HomeSafe” failure

Talk Talk’s new child filtering security product “HomeSafe” failed to block access to pornography sites. Parents who have been depending on this security product have been warned and were advised to supervise their children.

TalkTalk, UK’s 3rd largest communications provider was proud of its security product “HomeSafe”, and was promoting this product to its 4.1 million customers as it was designed to block pornography, viruses and other harmful contents. The parents need not install any other software as “HomeSafe” operates at the network level. Even MPs and campaigners praised the restriction of pornography on the web.

The system, for more than a week, failed to restrict access to porn hub and explicit videos were thrown open to the children. Cherith Hately, mother of three teenagers and an IT expert happened to check the service and to her horror found that the HomeSafe blocking page had been banished to a small box usually reserved for advertising, opening access to Porn hub.

TalkTalk in its advertisement announced that once you become a subscriber of HomeSafe, you need not worry about your children seeing pornography. Now the security system has been literally and technically knocked down and TalkTalk is bound to inform all HomeSafe customers about the system’s failure and warn them to supervise their children more.

The failure of the system was admitted by a spokesman of the firm and also said that their technicians were working to fix it. He was not sure whether it was a technical failure or some pornographers purposely damaged it. He added that being the only network-level filter, HomeSafe was very effective and was a great help to parents who want to prevent their children from surfing through pornographic sites. He admitted that no software could substitute for parental supervision; even then HomeSafe was a step in the right direction.

Due to pressure from the Government, BT, Virgin Media and Sky the three biggest communications providers in the UK have agreed to offer software to restrict certain websites to the children.

TalkTalk’s approach was supported by many including Claire Perry, a Conservative MP, who is leading a parliamentary inquiry into online child protection. Mrs. Perry said that when she enquired the possibility of making access to internet pornography an ‘opt-in’, she was told by industry experts that a network-level filter was technologically impossible. She told that no technology can become a cure-all, TalkTalk’s HomeSafe gave parents a little comfort. At the same time her critics who are against network-level filtering argued that all security measures are vulnerable to glitches or circumvention and the sense of security is only a false notion.

Jim Killock of Open Rights Group said that it is better for the parents to make a list of websites which their children are to see. TalkTalk said that in May, it had blocked more than a million pages and the customer feedback was really encouraging.