intu shopping centres first in the UK to be child-friendly wifi certified

intu has become the UK’s first shopping centre owner to be certified as having child-friendly wifi at its national portfolio of popular shopping destinations.

The certification means that the free wifi provided at intu’s 14 centres across the UK, which are some of the largest and most popular in the country, has been proven to filter out inappropriate content. It has been awarded by Friendly Wifi, the government-initiated safe certification standard for public wifi.

intu was the first shopping centre landlord to introduce free customer wifi in 2013. This has led to a succession of in-centre digital experiences as part of intu’s drive to create compelling customer experiences and introduce more game-changing technologies to the retail sector, such as augmented reality experiences, wifi operated video games and queue jumping apps.

Roger Binks, customer experience director at intu, said: “intu’s centres are some of the UK’s most popular family day out destinations with 35 million customers and more than 400 million customers visits a year so we take the online safety of our customers very seriously as this certification shows.

“We hope that our decision to become Friendly Wifi certified encourages other landlords and retailers to follow our lead in ensuring online safety for all shoppers across the UK.”

Friendly WiFi was launched by the government to ensure public Wi-Fi meets minimum filtering standards, particularly in those areas where children are present. Venues displaying the Friendly WiFi symbol have wifi filters which deny access to pornography and webpages known by the Internet Watch Foundation to host indecent images of children and advertisements or links to such content.

Beverley Smith, director of Friendly WiFi said: “Shopping Centres are hubs for the young through to the old and intu provide a great shopping and entertainment experience for all. They are increasingly important to communities as both shopping and leisure destinations and it is great to see intu take the steps to ensuring that their visitors are kept safe online and protected from inappropriate material.

“I am thrilled to be able to welcome intu to the Friendly WiFi family and applaud their steps to making sure all of their centres are certified.  I am looking forward to working with their teams to shout about their certification and to show their customers their online journey is safe in their hands.”

intu will be displaying the Friendly WiFi symbol at its centres in the coming months.