TalkTalk is supporting Safer Internet Day 2016 as part of its commitment to helping its customers and families be safer online. Organised by the UK Safer Internet Research Centre, Safer Internet Day this year has the theme ‘Play your part for a better internet’ and calls upon young people, parents, teachers, companies, policymakers, social workers, law enforcers and others to help create a better internet.
Working together with the other major ISPs, TalkTalk helped to form Internet Matters, a not for profit organisation that helps parents to keep their children safer online. A recent study by Internet Matters reveals how most children realise the potential dangers of the internet but aren’t taking enough care to make sure they are safe.
- New research into children’s behaviour on the web shows only 47% of children have succeeded in setting their social media profiles to ‘private’
- 18% of children have given out personal information online like full name, home address or phone number
- 6% of children admit they meet up in real life with someone they’ve met online
To support Safer Internet Day, Internet Matters is encouraging parents to find out more about their children’s online behaviour and will be sharing a promotional video and number of downloadable resources for parents and schools on its website. It has also recently launched CyberSense, a new, interactive tablet app that parents and children play together to answer online safety questions.
TalkTalk led the industry when it comes to online safety. It was the first ISP to introduce HomeSafe, the free whole home filtering solution that includes parental controls as an extension of this safety tool.
- Every day HomeSafe stops approximately 100,000 webpages of inappropriate content that our customers don’t want their children to see. This equates to 36,000,000 a year.
- In the last 12 months, HomeSafe has consistently filtered more suicide and weapons related webpages than those showing pornographic material
- So far this year, January 2nd was HomeSafe’s peak day, picking up over 170,000 webpages – children were still on school holidays, and were probably playing with the new devices they got for Christmas!
In the last week alone, HomeSafe has filtered over 45,000 webpages with suicide content.