This video was shared in December 2024. It was recorded on a 10 year-old child's school iPad supplied by City of Edinburgh Council in Scotland. The authentication uses Microsoft 365 Education/Apple ID.
The video illustrates not only that the VPN filters (provided by Lightspeed Systems) could be easily bypassed to access unlimited explicit content via search engines including Yahoo (search results provided by Microsoft Bing), but that the UK Government recommended school filter testing service (TestFiltering.com) did not give accurate results.
After this video was shared, Edinburgh City Council wrote to the parents of all 37,000 children affected in the city, admitting this was an issue (BBC article). The Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Education, Jenny Gilruth also wrote to every Scottish council to ask them to check they weren't similarly exposed (Telegraph report).
The Edinburgh iPad scheme is run by Canadian IT contractor CGI. The company also manage the iPad schemes in Glasgow and the Scottish Borders.
In September 2025 - nine months after the warning issued by Jenny Gilruth - it was revealed that not only were Glasgow and Borders councils similarly affected, but on some children's devices supplied by Glasgow City Council, Yahoo and other vulnerable search engines were still not blocked despite council claims (BBC report).
This video is listed as 18+ on YouTube so you will need to be logged in to YouTube to access it. However all explicit content is fully blurred so it is watchable.