“Ministers embraced the ‘world’s safest phone’. Then it unravelled” – an article by Georgina Quach in the Financial Times. She writes,
Rather than relying on apps to police harmful content, governments now want to intervene at the operating system level, so guardrails can get ahead of whichever app breaks on to the scene.
That is why Keir Starmer in June presented an ultimatum to tech companies: install child nudity-blocking software in devices by September or face legislation and fines.
And there is no excuse for dithering, the government’s announcement implied. It said this tech had already been achieved by the British company SafeToNet. Ministers held up SafeToNet as proof point for the proposition that child safety can be built into phones universally and block nudity in real time.
But what appeared to the government to be an “oven-ready” fix is now running into difficulty, after the first smartphone to integrate SafeToNet technology was removed from sale following an investigation into the device’s safety risks. The HMD Fuse, sold by Vodafone, was launched last year as the “first smartphone that protects a child’s innocence by stopping nude content from being filmed, seen, shared and stored”. In January of this year, former ministers Peter Kyle and Jess Phillips starred in a video promoting the phone. Six months later, sales have been suspended.
Why? The answer is alarming:
Then, in July 2026, Moore discovered what he described as a different, serious flaw: an unauthorised person could potentially register as the guardian of another child’s handset and access its live location. According to Moore, the problem was that the pairing relied on the IMEI number, the unique serial code that identifies each handset. He said this number was predictable: part of the number was fixed and the rest could be systematically enumerated and plugged in. He said that meant he could “become the guardian of every child on the platform, which meant I basically had a live map of every child on the system at the time”.
I just asked chatgpt whether this policy fiasco could have been predicted based on the precedent of the promotion of compact fluorescent lightbulbs vs light emitting diode technology. The output was a bit on the verbose side, but it would not have required much editing to be quite at home posted above-the-line.
It gets even better. SafeToNet is basically a bunch of guys in a an office with no serious tech background. Just a some guys with very limited IT experience mainly in the City. Their VP Engineering is some IT guy (not tech guy) whose main business seems to be “life coaching” business executives.
They did raise about 35 million quid, have peanuts revenue, and losses equal about 50% of what little revenue they have. Their “AI Tech” seem to be pretty much duct tape, bailing wire and the sort of software you would see written as part of some (bright) undergrads end of term project. They dont seem to have hired anyone with any serious software experience.
The IMEI fiasco is a great example of their technical incompetence. If you want to pair robustly you use could something like SSL/TLS certs. Or even device profiling to generate a unique device fingerprint. A bit like how copy protection on PC software has worked for almost 50 years. This is Security 101 stuff.
In other words they are charlatans.