Nomad Digital to fight illegal content alongside Internet Watch Foundation

Nomad Digital, the world’s largest rail-travel WiFi provider, has joined forces with the Internet Watch Foundation to fight criminal online content on its global rail networks; Nomad and the Internet Watch Foundation are both based in the U.K., where Nomad provides WiFi services to 75 percent of the country’s trains.

Nomad already blacklists content it deems inappropriate for public trains, but it will now disallow access to deep web URLs that the Internet Watch Foundation believes could contain criminally obscene material.

The main goal of the initiative is to fight the dissemination of underage and child pornography, which is one of the core roles of the Internet Watch Foundation.

“As the primary Internet service provider for the transport sector in the UK, we have a clear responsibility to [help our customers] protect [their] passengers from all forms of inappropriate and criminal online content,” Nomad Digital CEO Andrew Taylor said.

Taylor said blacklisting such material is already a principle to which the company has always subscribed, and being the first transportation technology firm to work partner with the Internet Watch Foundation serves to further that aim.

“For many years we have worked with blacklisting providers to fight the spread of harmful content as much as possible,” Taylor said. “Working with the IWF, we can take this campaign one significant step further, moving from blacklisting to altogether blocking criminal content across all the trains that carry our technology."

Along with the new software to block criminal content, Nomad will roll out a new “Friendly WiFi” scheme that train operators can advertise and post in their coaches once they have incorporated the new technology.