BT Parental Controls Not working

[Tomper]

I am having the same issue. The parental controls worked fine for many years and are now not blocking anything, not even "mainstream" adult sites (e.g. pornhub.com). The problem exists across all our devices. We have two children in the house and do not know what to do.

We did move to a no-landline broadband only deal a few months back, and were sent a new Smart hub 2 for this. I don't know if that is relevant. Have tried factory reset on hub, and turning controls off and on etc. 

[JohnC2]

Hi @Tomper, sorry the Parental Controls are not working for you. Please check that you are using BT's DNS settings How to check your DNS settings | BT Help and let me know.

Cheers

John

[Tomper]

Hi John, 

Thanks for your help. I've checked that but that can't have been it: the settings are as they should be.

[Tomper]

Don't know if this is relevant. My wifi is showing up as 'Wifi 2' and won't let me rename it to 'Wifi'. 

Could it be that there is a "ghost" network somewhere in the background and the parental controls are enabled for it, but not the actual network I'm on?

I don't know if that makes sense. Even if it does - I wouldn't know how to fix the issue.

[JohnC2]

Hi @Tomper, thanks for checking the DNS settings and posting back. 

I've sent you a Private Message so you can get in touch with the Mod team and we'll look into this further for you.

Cheers

John

[DPW1982]

I note that i am not the only person having an issue, this leads me to suspect that there are many out there who think they have adequate protections in place, when in fact they dont,

I flagged this up to BT 4-5 days ago, and not seen any progress,

I think there perhaps should be more urgency in looking into these issues

[Keith_Beddoe]

@DPW1982 

I would suspect that these issues are being cause by data integrity problems, especially when services are re-graded. Accounts need  to be linked to the correct network profile, so that the controls work as expected.

Its quite possible that manual intervention is needed to re-establish the link between account and network profile.

DNS based parental controls are easily circumvented, unless you run your own home DNS server which blocks other DNS services, and only forwards acceptable requests.

[Tomper]

Thanks for posting this David. I see that your original post on the issue resulted in a moderator offering to send you a private message. The same happened to me. May I ask whether this helped you at all? I may be being overly cautious, but in the private message I received I was asked for a lot of identifying information - Name, account number, telephone number, email, amount of last bill etc - and I didn't feel confident supplying this to a forum moderator, or sure of why they needed it. So I didn't respond.

Interested to know if the same happened to you, and how you responded.  

[Keith_Beddoe]

@Tomper 

The information asked by the moderator is needed to validate you as the account holder. Without this information the moderator (who is a BT Employee), would not be permitted to access your account settings, or pass the information to the back office team who deal with Parental Control issues.

[DPW1982]

I've provided everything Ive been asked for and all I can see that has been done is that a complaint has been lodged.

I've seen no progress at all I'm afraid to say, will let you know if I get anywhere.

I'm losing patience to be honest, are these reasonable grounds to leave BT mid contrac? I've lost confidence in the product.