Only a fraction of UK households have decided to turn on internet filters blocking non-“family friendly” content, despite new rules trumpeted by the government that force ISPs to offer new customers an “unavoidable choice” on the matter, according to Ofcom.
The regulator’s report on internet safety measures was requested by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which struck a deal with the UK’s big four ISPs to introduce parental controls by the end of December 2013.
Although there was no breakdown as to how many new customers presented with the choice to turn on “family friendly network-level filtering” actually have children living in their household, the stats seem to show that few, if any, care.
Just 5% of new BT customers, 8% of Sky customers and 4% of Virgin Media customers agreed to the filters – which are flicked on by default if users try to click “next” through the start-up wizard.
The only exception was TalkTalk, where a comparatively sizeable 36% kept parental controls on.
Despite having offered such services since May 2011, the ISP still saw a sizeable increase in the number of users opting for parental controls since it was made compulsory to check, from around 20% pre-December 2013.
Seeking to explain the apparent low interest in parental controls across UK households, Ofcom claimed that around 40% have no children residing there.
The report claimed that other factors affecting subscriber numbers include “the extent to which parents have already adopted alternative parental controls such as device level filtering, or other approaches to securing their children’s online safety.”
Ofcom singled out Virgin Media for criticism in the report for failing to launch family friendly filtering until February 2013, and even then, for offering an “unavoidable choice” to only 35% of customers.
“The majority of new Virgin Media installations involve an engineer visit,” it explained.
“Virgin Media believes that in many cases the engineer runs the broadband activation process and bypasses or ignores the filtering choice. It has recognised that this is a failure in process and indicated it is taking steps to address this gap.”
The report also highlighted numerous failings on the part of the ISPs and their partners where websites had been mis-categorized and therefore needlessly blocked.
Sky received an average of 110 reports from customers each month, with 27 mis-categorized; BT has received eight requests from site owners, of which six needed to be re-categorized; Virgin has had to change 13 site categorizations; and TalkTalk said it had around five request from site owners each month.
Charles Sweeney, CEO of web filtering company Bloxx, argued the report shows take-up has been “incomprehensively low”.
“However, technology alone isn’t the answer – good, open communication channels within the family are also key and equipping children with the skills to know how to deal with what to do if they accidentally access inappropriate content,” he told Infosecurity.
“More education is urgently needed around the availability of family friendly filtering services in order to drive uptake and protect children.”