Net Nanny has a long, important history of helping families stay safe online. It began when the web was still young. It was created by Gordon Ross in 1994, the same year that Netscape started, a year before Internet Explorer shipped, and over a decade before Chrome existed. Gordon has said that after seeing a sting operation on a pedophile soliciting a child online, he could see the need for a service that could protect children online.

In the mid-2000s, Net Nanny was combined with patented content analysis software from ContentWatch that gave it a huge advantage in terms of knowing what a web page said and therefore if it was safe. Other products were generally adding bad sites to lists of bad sites to block children from, while Net Nanny knew, live, on any web page whether it was safe or not.

But while Net Nanny 10's classical machine learning makes a real difference for thousands of families, the web is not just text. Plentiful bandwidth has meant that image and video content have exploded. And a system trained to read text can't see a picture.

In 2021, Net Nanny was acquired by SafeToNet, a global leader in online safeguarding. SafeToNet is on a mission to protect children all over the world from online harms. One key new technology that SafeToNet pioneers is called HarmBlock which can be built into any device, platform or app. That same thing that made Net Nanny so incredible when looking at text? HarmBlock does that with pictures and video using AI to stop explicit and inappropriate content– children can't see it, film it and share it. Even in live-stream and encrypted environments. Right on the child's phone. It is amazing. Watch the demo and read about it here.

If you're interested in seeing how HarmBlock develops and the hardware and software that are being built with that level of safety built-in, take a look at the SafeToNet newsroom over at safetonet.com. We're excited for the technology that we're developing that will keep children safe today and into the future.