Vodafone Secure Net

After renewing my contract with Vodafone yesterday ( 13 September 2019 ), I received a text message saying that Vodafone had turned on 'Vodafone Secure Net' for free for 3 months, and after that, they would charge me £1 a month for the service.

I had not requested this service and did not want it as I have my own security packages.

I tried turning off the service via the link they sent ( www.vodafone.co.uk/turnoff ) and it failing and trying to turn it off directly from my account, without success, I contacted Vodafone by phone on their 191 (free) contact number.

After I explained that I wanted Vodafone Secure Net removed from my account and that I required an email confirming my instruction, the Vodafone rep' tried to say that it was part of the contract when I renewed!

I wonder if anyone else had this happen when signing up for Vodafone or renewing their contract?.... it might be as well to check your account to make sure you are not being charged for something you didn't want or ask for.

https://support.vodafone.co.uk/Consumer-Products-and...

Thanks for the link .... it would have been nice if Vodafone had included that link when they put Secure Net on my account. Thanks again

In reply to a post by sam_nospam:

I wonder if anyone else had this happen when signing up for Vodafone or renewing their contract?.... it might be as well to check your account to make sure you are not being charged for something you didn't want or ask for.

Yes, it came free when I bought a SIM only deal earlier in the year. I didn't want it, so had to follow the page Andrew posted.

Thanks for the reply.

I already had security packages so didn't need the 'free' Secure Net included when I renewed my contract and was grateful to Andrew for providing the link to turn off the 'free' service.

Resurrecting an old thread, but thought it might be interesting... similar experience here.

I also had Secure Net auto-enabled when I bought a new iPhone in Jan and got a text today saying the free period would shortly expire.

Shifted over to the desktop (I prefer proper keyboards ) and had a look at their "About" page, saw

In reference to securenet.vodafone.co.uk/About:

Disclaimer: Secure Net cannot detect Malicious Files and Viruses within encrypted websites and does not work over Wi-Fi, including Home Broadband.

My bold, not clear how it handles https sites...

Entered the link in the text message, Chrome was most reluctant to go there because the site doesn't support https and then the page refused to load because of my adblocker .

That was enough for me, back to the mobile and tapped the text link, it cancelled OK using the resident browser (Safari).

(I hadn't seen Andrew's link.)

Unless vodafone decrypted and re-encrypted all https traffic (ie. man-in-the-middle) how would you expect them to monitor for bad content?

In reply to a post by mbames:

Unless vodafone decrypted and re-encrypted all https traffic (ie. man-in-the-middle) how would you expect them to monitor for bad content?

I wouldn't, I was being sarcastic^*, but considering the emphasis these days on using https I didn't think it sat too well with their claims on the site about the degree of protection provided.

Although to be fair, I'll accept that they're no worse than others offering similar network-based services.

Funny thing is, the site is working with https now and not bothered about the adblocker


^*My bad really, it doesn't work very well in text

I did wonder!

I assume that pretty much all secure net does it block certain DNS lookups from working. Obviously using pi-hole or likely any other DNS resolve to any of the large public DNS resolvers would bypass it and make it totally worthless

First thing that gets completely disabled when re-contracting with Vodafone here.

Total waste of time and another neat money spinner for VF, for customers who forget after the free period is up.