Proxy Servers Provide Portals to Porn

Don’t you love alliteration? Well, I try.

Last week I presented “Porn-Proof Kids!” at a local women’s conference for my church. I enjoy empowering adults so they can prepare kids to avoid pornography’s dangerous influence. A few attendees asked me to expand on the issue of proxy websites.

Why are they important?

Because proxy websites allow internet pornography to be anonymous and accessible--two powerful reasons why it's so addictive.

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First, a basic definition: A proxy server is a website that receives requests from clients (like your kids) and goes out to another website and gets those resources. It’s a “go-between” website that gets through the filters. There are legitimate reasons why proxy websites exist (for security, for speed, to save bandwidth, to scan content for malware etc.). But many people use proxy websites to circumvent internet filtering and access content that otherwise would be blocked…like pornography.

For example, you may have a very good filter set up on your computer. It blocks known porn sites and provides good protection from accidental exposure to pornography. However, if your son or daughter knows anything about proxy websites, they may be able to access pornography despite your filter. The filter never "sees" the porn site, it’s just "sees" the proxy site.

For our purposes, let's talk about Open Proxies. According to Wikipedia, “An open proxy is a forwarding proxy server that is accessible by any Internet user.” Gordon Lyon, a computer network security expert, estimates that there are hundreds of thousands of open proxies on the Internet.

In fact, anonymous open proxies allow users to conceal their IP address while browsing the Web or using other Internet services.

OK, I’ve pretty much hit the limit of my technical understanding of proxy websites.

The main take away for you is that kids know about proxy servers and they use them! Two examples may suffice:

• A friend of mine has a son whose Jr. High School class issued all the students laptop computers. The computers were all protected with filtering software, but the kids knew how to get around the filters by using proxy websites.
• My daughter graduated from college a few years ago, but when she was a freshman, her university blocked access to YouTube (maybe to save bandwidth, maybe to screen out porn). But the kids soon found a way to use proxy websites to get the YouTube access they wanted.

That’s why I stress that porn-proofing is a matter of shaping ATTITUDES more than denying ACCESS. Thanks to proxy servers, you cannot fully deny access to pornography.

Just search under “most popular proxy sites” and you’ll see why.

What else do you know about the use of proxy websites? How can you educate your kids so they understand that circumventing filters to view porn can lead to a dangerous addiction? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts!