Safe Surfer is pleased to announce our exclusive partnership with Samsung New Zealand that will provide families with the option to buy a quality kid-safe phone. Samsung is the dream platform and hardware to embed Safe Surfer, so we’re excited about how this collaboration will benefit families and their loved ones throughout New Zealand and the South Pacific Islands. A copy of Samsung’s announcement can be found below:

In late May 2023, Microsoft announced Windows Copilot, a new AI-powered personal assistant for Windows 11. This new feature will soon become available as a tool to help with day-to-day tasks. Windows Copilot is powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT engine. According to Microsoft, … you can ask Windows Copilot a range of questions from simple to complex. If I want to call my family in Cyprus, I can quickly check the local time to make sure I’m not waking them up in the middle of the night.

In late February 2023, Snapchat announced My AI, a new chatbot experience. Available to Snapchat+ subscribers, My AI is powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT engine. According to Snapchat, My AI can recommend birthday gift ideas for your BFF [Best Friend Forever], plan a hiking trip for a long weekend, suggest a recipe for dinner, or even write a haiku about cheese for your cheddar-obsessed pal. Make My AI your own by giving it a name and customizing the wallpaper for your Chat.

Over the past several months, tech companies such as Google and Microsoft have been busy working on new customer experiences surrounding chatbots. In a nutshell, using a modern chatbot is similar to using a customer service chat bubble that you might find at the lower corner of a website. But instead of using live humans or a small range of answers, the process is entirely automated with a large source of information—this results in something called “generative AI”, a tailor-made answer created by a computer service.

This press release is from our friends at The Good Source, who take advantage of the technology built by Safe Surfer to create a remarkably clean online surf experience. Harmful digital content, such as pornography and violence can now be blocked at the source, protecting young and vulnerable internet users, thanks to a technological breakthrough pioneered by a new safety-first Internet Service Provider (ISP). Tauranga-based company, The Good Source, will provide fast, family-friendly fibre internet that blocks harmful digital content.

Friendly WiFi, which launched in July 2014, was developed by the UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS) with government support and is administered by the trade organisation RDI. The certification, designated by the official ‘Friendly WiFi’ symbol, verifies that Safe Surfer’s web filter solutions block known pornography and child abuse websites using recognised filters for WiFi deployments, and they are now an official Approved Provider. Safe Surfer can now display the third-party designation as additional assurance that Safe Surfer is committed to enabling safe WiFi experiences for children and families where its filtering technology is relied upon over WiFi.

Hot off the heels of our in-depth report on YouTube Shorts, Safe Surfer has discovered that the comments feature for YouTube videos is being abused by spam accounts to spread pornographic content. Companies, in the marketing of their upcoming movies and television series, frequently post trailers to promote new content—an example of this could be Disney. To grow its customer base, the company posts promotional trailers to YouTube for new Disney+ streaming content from key franchises such as Marvel and Star Wars.

Update 18 August 2023: since this article was originally published in May 2022, we suspect that Google have since made at least some improvements to the content that gets fed through YouTube Shorts to devices with YouTube restrictions applied. This highlights our concern with regard to the technology sector where new technologies and experiences for consumers can be released at the expense of safety. We think that safety should be by design, rather than a later addition.

There are so many practical things we as parents can do to raise safe, wise and kind digital users. Filtering and monitor software is a must. Clear rules and boundaries are vital. But the one thing I believe bears the most long-term fruit is the building of a healthy digital culture in our homes: an established and consistent way of seeing and doing things which becomes part of the fabric of our character and family.

The sayings like “Monkey see, monkey do” or “Actions speak louder than words” are pretty accurate when it comes to the way children interpret the world around them. We can be super well-intentioned, proactive at setting clear boundaries for our kid’s screen time, have the Internet usage limits set and everything, and then, model some less than impressive screen habits of our own which disempower the healthy messages we voice.

We spoke to Attitude Presenter Brayden Murdoch about what he’s learnt through talking to thousands of young people every year about healthy relationships and making positive choices. Here’s what he had to say when we had a conversation about porn. We live in a world where watching porn on your device between maths and science classes is common.I get to walk through a lot of school quads. As I seamlessly blend into the crowds of fresh faced youths, I often pass a huddle of teenagers fixated on a device.

Your kids will step into the uncharted waters of social media at some point. How do you teach them to swim between the flags? Creating a social media account for your child won’t put them at risk of becoming a self-proclaimed ‘influencer’, or an online food critic whose blog is exclusively about your cooking. But there are real risks that are important to be aware of, and it’s important to walk alongside your child as they take their first steps into the social media sea.

We all know we’re only one misjudged Google search, or an accidental banner click, away from being exposed to something we didn’t intend on finding. And, short of peering over your offspring’s shoulder every web-surfing second, there are a few simple “go-to” tips from the team at Safe Surfer to help ensure your kids don’t stumble into untoward content. 1. Talk to your kids This one’s a no-brainer and kids aren’t silly.

Introducing screens often begins with simple and innocent thinking like how awesome a tablet will be for helping your young person learn to read, or write or math or research, or perhaps it’s a cell phone for safety and connectivity. And not too soon after your kiddos have got their very own device for ‘learning’ or comms with you, they’re asking to download a game they heard their friend talking about, and then next week it’s another.

My three year old loves “Bubbleguppies”. And “Dora the Explorer”. I know the theme tunes off by heart. It does my head in. I’m comfortable allowing her some screen time and, to some degree, I rest easier knowing these shows are often as educational as they are entertaining. But I’ve got to keep a sharp eye on things as she gravitates closer to the back-lit screen and zones out to the real world.

Sex ed should be a series of evolving conversations. One in three New Zealand boys are watching pornography on a regular basis. Girls are watching porn, too. It’s just too easy to access. No more walking through the video shop to a dimly-lit R18 nook. Accessing porn is now as easy as opening a web browser and entering a search term 🔍 So—where to from here? Parenting in the digital age requires us to be brave and rewrite what the norm was in our childhood sex education.