While the UK Prime Minister David Cameron is confident that British people want their worldwide web censored in order to protect their children, it turns out that he is wrong.

The statistics say that broadband subscribers are overwhelmingly choosing not to use parental-control systems from Internet service providers foisted by the British government: take-up in the single digits for 3 of 4 largest ISPs, even though many of them have to opt into an uncensored web.

According to the Ofcom report, the vast majority of new subscribers refuse to opt for the Internet filters and the idea was just a waste of time. An expensive one though. Only 5% of new BT customers chose to turn the parental control on, 8% opted in for Sky and 4% for Virgin Media. In the meantime, TalkTalk rolled out it own parental-control system 2 years before the British government even thought about it, and the company has had much better take-up of its offering: more than 1/3 of its customers sign up for it.

According to statistics provided by Ofcom, around 40% of UK homes would likely have children in them, but the authority admits that customer demographics varied by broadband provider. For example, BT claims that only 20-25% of its customer base has children of a relevant age.

In the meantime, the regulating body noted that previous research revealed about 42% of British homes with children already had parental controls of some kind before David Cameron introduced his innovation. According to BT, around 9% of its customers (which represents 40% of those with young children) use a device-based filter instead of the network-level filter.

This means that people who wanted to protect their children had already solved their problem and Cameron’s idea appeared useless. Finally, Ofcom had to admit that all filters can easily be ignored by an advanced user, or as it puts it, “dedicated and technically competent user with the help of advice available on the Internet”. In fact, it is known that those filters can be dodged by using basic proxy services like Google Images or Google Translate.

So, what is all this about? The statistics reveals that most British users just do not want to be protected by the government and keep ignoring Cameron’s attempts to censor what they do online.