Tech-Savvy Kids Are Ruffling Schools’ Feathers

It worried me recently when I read about the escalating use of anonymous proxies by students trying to bypass Web filtering technology, mainly because of the risks associated with unrestricted Internet access. The Internet is an incredibly important and useful resource for education, yet it can also impact productivity as students have the opportunity to waste time surfing social networking Web sites or bandwidth-sapping media download sites. More importantly, there’s a lot of bad stuff on the Net which really shouldn’t be seen by children.

Teachers notice when students are spending too much time gossiping in the classroom, whereas quietly surfing the Internet is not quite so obvious, yet it has the potential to expose children to inappropriate and even harmful material if not properly regulated. This is particularly concerning for the education sector as school IT administrators are required to protect children from the pernicious aspects of the Internet.

As children’s knowledge of technology and the Internet continues to evolve, students are finding new subversive ways in which to access non-work related sites during school hours, creating further challenges for Internet filters and IT managers. The easiest and most popular means of doing this is by connecting to an anonymous proxy server, a Web site that enables users to access URLs that may otherwise have been blocked by an Internet filter.

An anonymous proxy server is a routing communications between a computer and the Internet that can hide or mask your unique address to prevent unauthorised access to your computer over the Internet. The idea being to help protect your privacy while you are online, but also to get around Internet blocks while at school or work. For instance while on campus, when you use the Internet at school it will likely block sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Students can use a freely available proxy server site to unblock MySpace, as well as any other site.

Child protection should be a school’s first priority and so blocking access to inappropriate content is critical - especially for protecting a school’s reputation. Hundreds of anonymous proxy sites are created each week and blocking them using traditional Internet filtering software, which rely on black lists, is simply no longer effective. Schools must be aware of how to manage and regulate Internet access by deploying the right technology in order to avoid children coming across inappropriate online content, whether accidentally or otherwise.