Beyond the Firewall : The Dark Side of the Web

Many years ago, when almost no one had androids, and it was mostly the phones with buttons that could browse the internet that was in existence, I remember my mom used to have one of those phones and what I would do was wait until whenever she recharged on her phone and then use the free data that she was gifted to download mobile games.

I mostly did this during the evenings, when it was rush hours at her shop and she had almost no time for her mobile phone. This became a routine for me almost every night, downloading games from websites like waptrick and sefan.ru and then playing them all night until she eventually starts looking for the phone.

On one particular evening, I wasn't in the mood for games and wanted to download movies instead, so I had logged into one of those sites, and instead of clicking on games, I had clicked on videos. I remember scrolling down a bit to see what they had there as this was my first time attempting to download any video of any sort, and it was while I was scrolling that I stumbled on some x-rated videos, sitting right there in the open.

I remember immediately getting really scared and cautious of my surroundings the moment I saw that because I knew I was a dead man if my dad caught me thinking about something like that, not to talk of browsing through it.

That was the first time I got to know that it was that easy getting access to x-rated content online because prior to that time, I've always known it to be grown up stuff and had thought that I needed to get to a certain age to be granted access.

_{photo by Sai Abhinivesh Burla}

When we talk about how we could help protect our kids from some of these online contents that could corrupt them, and we're asked who should see to it that kids doesn't get access to this kind of things, the parents or the owners of the websites, the answer is a pretty simple, it's both of them but it's more of the owners of the websites.

And the reason why I say this is because if little kids can't get access to some of this corrupt data no matter what they search and browse, due to very strong restrictions from the website owners, there will be little to nothing for the parents to crosscheck or protect their kids from.

I say this because as a parent, you could try to protect your kids by constantly checking their phones, computers and their browser histories and all that, but what about the phone of their friends, the ones you can't check. They could easily watch whatever it is they wanted to watch from their friends phone while leaving theirs clean.

And so when they come back from school and you go through their phones, you find nothing there and you think your son is safe from these kind of contents, not knowing that he or she is consuming it somewhere else.

Although all of this stress won't be necessary if the websites owner just simply restrict them from accessing it and they should also restrict little kids from creating accounts where they could manipulate their age and pretend like they're older than they actually are, in order to gain access into older sites.

So yeah, maybe a system should be put in place where before you access certain websites, you're asked to put in your thumbprint and the website would automatically access your date of birth online, using that thumbprint and know if truly you're old enough to see the contents of that website.

Something like that would really come in handy and stop this problem entirely.