Net Nanny is the oldest and perhaps most easily recognized parental controls company in the safety tech industry. Headquartered in Philadelphia with satellite offices in Salt Lake City, Net Nanny is a major provider of parental controls in the United States and around the world with active customers in over 30 countries. It has a strong, if not leading market position in the U.S, Canada, Japan and Australia. Net Nanny has become universally associated with online child safety.
By merging the two firms, the directors of both companies strongly believe the newly combined child online safety product portfolio will be unique in the industry and significantly change the Safety Tech landscape. Crucially, it will improve the safety of children online by providing a deep AI feature set unrivaled anywhere in the world.
The UK Government’s impending enactment of the Online Harms Legislation will create a regulatory framework for online safety and will make clear social media companies’ responsibilities to keep UK users, and particularly children, safer online. We would expect similar legislation to be adopted in the European Union and United States. The acquisition of Net Nanny gives SafeToNet an industry-leading product portfolio that social networking companies, messaging apps and chat rooms can deploy to ensure their compliance with any new Online laws, or frameworks for compliance with existing laws, that may be proposed.
The merger also provides a wider range of safeguarding technologies across iOS & Android smartphones and tablets, as well as Windows and MacOS laptops and desktops and Kindle-based products. This means that online child safety will be improved across the range of anticipated areas defined in the Online Harms legislation, across an increasingly wide range of devices, in innovative new ways.
Net Nanny’s highly regarded and capable device management features will connect into SafeToNet’s real-time safety indicator software and provide parents with the tools to block an app or phone based upon the online risk levels of their child. The new combined product platform will provide children with further mindfulness and wellbeing advice if they search web sites for issues such as self-harm, low self-esteem, loneliness and sadness. We will also be able to improve the appropriateness of the advice and guidance we give by detecting other issues such as eating disorders and body image issues which seem to be fueled by many social media apps.
Perhaps most revolutionary, the partnership will accelerate the development of SafeToWatch, our recently announced real-time video threat detector, by at least 9 months, allowing us to proactively and in real time disable or block a camera from taking intimate images of children, an activity which the Internet Watch Foundation tells us is increasingly prevalent and dangerous. SafeToWatch was recently featured in this BBC Click episode
In summary, we cannot overstate the significance of this acquisition. Net Nanny is without a doubt the most established provider of screen time management, device control and web filtering software in the world. The merging of our two companies creates a powerhouse in the Safety Tech market and on a truly international scale. We believe it will prove to be a pivotal moment in our company’s history and moreover in online child safety.
