Ethics of owning Proxy sites

I have my first one. I asked my wife if she thought such a thing was unethical and she said yes.

Basic reasoning is that you are enabling people to do things (nameley surf sites) that for whatever reason somebody else doesn't want them to do AND has the legal right to keep them from doing it. (e.g. work or school...while you're on their property using their internet connection they have a right to block sites if they want.)

Just wondering what the opinions are out there on this. I still haven't made up my mind. In theory I agree with my wife. Part of me says "they're just going to use somebody else's proxy if not mine", but that is not a valid justification. People are going to use drugs whether I decide to become a dealer or not, but that doesn't make being a dealer morally OK.

Not that I'm comparing proxy sites to drug dealers, no way. Just using that as an example to better illustrate my point.

So, I guess I'm conflicted about it. Why might people be using a proxy site other than to get around blocks placed by work/school?

 

Well, I used a proxy when I bought a new domain and loaded up my pages. My ISP propogates really slow so I used a proxy to check out the site if it's live and how it looks.

 

I would say yes, it is unethical.
The very nature of proxies attracts the wrong sorts of people.
Any service can be abused in a way you could not foresee/intend but with proxies you know for sure that your service will be used for unethical things.
The fact is that most services have a majority of good users and a minority of bad, with something like a proxies the ratio is much closer.

Try and market at certain things like "avoid work and school filters" this is much more likely to keep your proxies use relativity clean (some nsfw things would probably be expected though)

Try and be responsible, log ips, set cookies for re-identification and record visited sites and things like the meta tags on the site, if the meta tags throw up something bad ban the user.
Make sure you report serious abuse to isps.

Also consider blocking groups of ip's - certain countries may cause problems.

 

I for one am using it to check up SERPs in Google or Yahoo.

I am Romanian and Google is showing me different SERPs for the words I am optimizing. Therefore I am using a proxy site to check them up.

You should know not all the people use it for bad stuff

 

You can restrict the things people are allowed to go on, and are not in your config files.

So people can get past filters for the right reasons, and not to break the law etc.

 

You can be unethical with a pencil or almost anything if you so chose. Proxies also have legitimate uses.

 

Same here, even for UK visitors google will deliver different SERPS.
Also, some CPA offers will redirect if your IP isnt detected as being from USA. I use ninjaproxy.com just to check what some CPA offers look like.

You could start a proxy niched towards internet marketers!

 

Think about this...

If you give someone a cow for them to milk, etc .. that's completely ethical.

If the person you give it to performs acts against animal rights to that animal (yea you know what I mean) then they are being unethical.

With a proxy site, what you are doing is completely ethical. If some people decide to use it for the wrong reasons, then what can you do?

It's then up to the person who's network they are on to block your site.

 

But come on, everybody knows what proxies are really for, right? Cow's are for milking, and proxies are for beating filters.

 

Theres one sole purpose for a proxy, and that is to stay anonymous on the internet, thats why they were made nothing more need be said. But, A lot of people choose to abuse what a proxy is for... aka beating filters, ect... just my two cents..

 

Dont forget the chinese people who use proxies to actually be able to surf the web. Their access to a big part of the internet are blocked by the stupid moron idiotic chinese government bastards.

 

You will not think it's unethical when that big fat adsense check comes it

 

That's what it comes down to. I would definitely report any abusive surfing such as child porn, etc. Otherwise, to each his own.

 

We have to admit the fact, it's for security, only 2 types of people want security,
either people who do something wrong, and don't want to reveal it.
or people who want to keep the right people from knowing wrong things..
I guess I messed up..

 

its as unethical as bunking school or going out for a cigratte in work time.
everyone needs some fun man.
thats what the internet is all about.

 

The safe surfing and site checking are ligit but Nigerian 419 scammers access my site via anonymous proxies all the time because I block most of Africa.

I also get a lot of bogus car/bike/boat scam ads placed where the seller prices the item at 50-25% of value and then tries to get the victim to wire money overseas. Almost 100% of these are through anon proxies.

My vote is they are unethical