Safeguard won't stay enabled

[#1]

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@adamskirton wrote:

Are you seriously saying the safeguard has not been working for over a year?!!

I only noticed ours just over a month ago!

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It was working in January when I left as far as I understand it.   This is a new issue which appeared in April it appears.

[#2]

The reason not many people have reported it yet ... is because they think it's still working!

Most of us take on trust that Safeguard is working and don't want to check every 5 minutes that it is, and end up viewing the sort of stuff Plusnet are paid to filter out as part of their duty of care to us customers. 

Plus there will be people with gambling addictions now getting sucked back into a dark place etc etc

Maybe Plusnet could give us an estimate of how many children, like Molly Russell, are currently accessing internet 'nasties' in the safety of their bedrooms with the parent blissfully unaware.

It is essential Plusnet warn all parents immediately ... or many parents will blame Plusnet for their children being abused in this way.

[#3]

@adamskirton  I suggest you need to face reality, Plusnet Safeguard is a very weak and easily defeated filtering system that will never provide the high security that you seem to expect. Have a read of this post #16 in another thread, in my opinion @Townman has got it completely right.

https://community.plus.net/t5/Everything-else/Safeguard-not-working-even-though-showing-as-active/td... 

[#4]

Email to philip.jansen@bt.com.

I suggest that more communication on the topic may help to highlight.

"Dear Mr Jansen,

I have been a Plusnet customer for over 10 years. I have two children aged X and Y who as I'm sure you can imagine like to use technology and access the internet in the same way as most other children of their age.

As a typically concerned parent I set-up the Plusnet Safeguard feature to protect my children from the very nasty and harmful parts of the internet. I also use the Access Control feature of the Plusnet router to ensure they aren't using their devices after the time I define.

At the weekend I discovered that the Safeguard feature wasn't working and that therefore my children had access to all the parts of the Internet I would like to keep them safe from. On investigation I found that the Safeguard feature has been unreliable for at least some Plusnet customers for at least two years and that previous incidents have taken over 6 months to fix. It appears that the current issue started somewhere near the start of April.

Given the protection that this service provides to parents wishing to keep their children safe (and assuming they are), I am frankly amazed that there has been no proactive communication from Plusnet to customers to make them aware of this issue.

I am also amazed that given the seriousness of this failure it is still ongoing after at least 6 weeks. Surely Plusnet should have invoked their DR plan for this system? Or in six weeks rebuilt the system from scratch and reimplemented. But no, neither of these things have happened and when I logged this with customer services the best I got was "we'll let you know when it's fixed but we have no ETA. So when? 6 weeks? 6 months?, never? 

I could of course use another service to protect my children such as OpenDNS, but this would require me to change the DNS settings in my router, which unfortunately Plusnet does not allow.

I bring this matter to your attention so you can ensure it is raised with Plusnet management and that the correct actions to restore the service as soon as possible are taken along with appropriate customer communication.

I suggest you review the Plusnet community thread here:

https://community.plus.net/t5/Everything-else/Safeguard-won-t-stay-enabled/td-p/1747164

I look forward to hearing how you are going to deal with this at your soonest opportunity.

Yours sincerely"

[#5]

Twice in the last 15 minutes I have posted an email I just sent to the BT CEO.

It was polite and informative.

I assume the moderator has removed it.

Is this against the rules?

[#6]

@daggermonkey  I don't think you can blame the moderators, it has probably got caught by the automated spam filter and will in due course be released.

[#7]

Safeguard isn't great but it did a decent job in our house with blocking all the websites and categories we don't want our kids on

As for supervising the kids whilst they are on their devices........so we are are going to sit with our 15 year old in his bedroom whilst he is online with his mates all evening....don't think so

I have added the Cloudflare DNS to the Xbox and PS4 and that seems to be stopping the porn showing up on those consoles browsers, but getting hold of his phone is proving difficult

[#8]

@RealAleMadrid I wasn't aware an automated spam filter existed. If that's the case I expect it will turn up twice,

Without the above knowledge I was just assuming it must be a moderator action, but was surprised as I wouldn't have expected it to break house rules.

Thank you for letting me know.

[#9]

I've asked the mods if there's anything stuck in the spam filter. I assure you we are not censoring you intentionally.

[#10]

@daggermonkey From what I have seen the  spam filter  has a mind of its own and knows nothing about the forum rules.😁

[#11]

Townman obviously doesn't have children, or doesn't have to work, or hasn't been through lock down. How many parents can shelve there own work whilst they supervise there kids online learning for 8 hours a day.

[#12]

Thanks for your message @RealAleMadrid ... glad lots of us are involved in this massively important topic.

I have no doubt it is easy for techies to defeat Plusnet's Safeguard ... but the statistics show that the majority of first exposures to internet porn and other 'nasties' are accidental. 

That is what we're trying to protect our children from.

It is unpleasant for us as adults to have inappropriate content appear on our screens following innocent searches ... but it can be lifechanging, in a very harmful way, for children. 

[#13 · Accepted solution]

Hi everyone, if you'd like to check your Safeguard settings now you should see that this particular problem has been resolved. 

Really sorry for the delay.

Important note, anything that anyone has ever added or removed to a white or black list and left it in that state will now have their content filtered in that manner.

[#14]

Wow - excellent, all working. Thank you Plusnet and please put an action plan in place to not allow this to take so long to resolve next time.

[#15]

@JonoH

Hope it is fixed. I am out at the moment so not tried ours at home. But why has it took so long and what was the cause. Just remember that this has happened before in recent years and it always takes ages to fix.

Is Safeguard a Plusnet run feature or is it a third party that provides it?