Keeping kids safe online in public places

Today, the Prime Minister has announced that six of the UK’s biggest WiFi providers – including Sky’s public WiFi network The Cloud – have signed up to a commitment to help keep children safe online by filtering out pornography and illegal content from their public WiFi services.

We’re pleased that this industry-wide agreement has finally been reached, as protecting children online while they are using the internet in public places is an issue that we’ve been proactively championing for more than six years.

As both a responsible business and the largest WiFi provider on the high street - which includes providing WiFi for the likes of Café Nero, Marks & Spencer and Pizza Express – we are committed to giving parents peace of mind that their children are protected from unsuitable content

That’s why we pioneered filtering harmful content out of our WiFi networks back in 2007, when we became the first public WiFi operator in the UK to offer our venue partners the opportunity to filter out adult content.  We stepped this up further last October by becoming the first WiFi provider to automatically filter out adult content across our entire network of 20,000 public hotspots.

We therefore wholeheartedly welcome the rest of the public WiFi industry signing up to this commitment too.   But we’re not complacent and we know that more will need to be done as technologies evolve.  That’s why we are committed to continuing to play a leading role in helping make public WiFi as safe as it can be.

But at the same time, we at Sky are also focused on what we can do to protect children in the home. For more details on what doing about this, please click here.