Change IP and Reduce Fear
Every mother and father can relate to the concern you feel for your child whenever they do something potentially dangerous. Some parents bubble-wrap their kids on their first bike rides so that when they fall, they simply create a bunch of noisy popping noises, rather than a sizable bruise. Any parent with a child involved in sports can also relate with this fear; are they going to be safe? Imagine your youngest son is going to play tackle football for the first time, and you look around and see the other kids seem to be a bit bigger than him. So you buy him a super-padded helmet, a tight pair of cleats, and a bunch of shoulder padding to make sure he isn’t hurt on a tackle. When he goes out to play, you watch nervously from the sidelines, and watch him like a hawk. While football is inherently a violent sport, gymnastics is not. Imagine your youngest daughter up on the balance beam, about to do a back flip, but looks like she is about to fall. Bells and instinctual alarms are going off in your head; “I have to help her!” You are to late, she jumps and…. Perfect landing. The judges hold up 9, 10, 9, 10. “Nine!” you think. What was he thinking?
While these are all things that every parent worries over, possible their biggest worry is the one they know the least; the Internet. The Internet is overall an incredible and helpful tool. Ten years ago, when a child was assigned a book report on Shakespeare, they had to travel down to their local library and scuttle up and down the aisles looking for the specific book they needed, and maybe even ask the feared austere librarian. Nowadays, lackadaisical high school students can hit their power buttons, do a quick Google search, misspell “Shakespeer”, click the “Did you mean Shakespeare?” box, and be on their way to the rest of their report. Sometimes, there are sites out there that offer to write reports for you for a minimal fee. Everything can be done online these days; some people don’t even leave their house to get their groceries, they just log on, order online, and have them delivered! The Internet isn’t all fun and games though.
With the massive amount of traffic the Internet sees, criminals are bound to pop-up. While they are stereotyped as unintelligent, life failures, these crooks know the best way to commit crimes with the best odds of getting away unscathed. Is a criminal going to try and pickpocket two guys walking on a semi-busy street, or is he going to try and get someone in the crowded subway? On the subway, he has many more potential targets, and can get away into the throng of people much easier. The same concept applies on the Internet, except even stronger. On high volume websites, identity thieves are less likely to be caught by online police, and think about this, is a mugging in a subway or an online one more likely to be busted? The online criminals are often nameless and untraceable, and if they are caught, they can just pack up shop, destroy the evidence on their computer, and flee to a new area.
Criminals who are in the pursuit of money aren’t the only ones who inhabit the Internet. With the advent of the social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook came swarms of kids of all ages onto the Internet to blog, chat, and just be known among their peers. If you have logged onto one of these sites, you will know there are pictures posted, personal information handed out, and other identification pieces haphazardly thrown around. With so much personal information being compromised, kids often decide to make their profile private, so that no one can view it but people they befriend. This sounds good, but due to the popular practice of “friending” where a child accepts any random person as a friend in order to boost their friend count, the privacy concept actually holds little weight on the web today.
With these social networking sites and their insecurity comes a new threat: having a real-life encounter. Your IP address which is like a nametag your computer wears and shows to every site you visit shows your location and even your browsing history on that site. Browsing history is one thing, but location is another. Anyone could easily impersonate somebody else online if they have a couple of photos, and imagine if a young child is talking to someone whom they believe is a classmate. The stalker could get all sorts of information and even arrange a meeting. This isn’t even the worst part. Through your IP address, which is visible to everyone, a hacker or pedophile could pinpoint a student just by reading their IP address; an impersonation wouldn’t even be needed.
This is every parents worst nightmare; having their child abducted. There is hope though, and you can fight back. By using a change IP proxy, you can change your IP address so it will not point right to your home. A mother of a young girl who lives in a small town in Long Island recently just purchased our Change IP Proxy software just for this reason. Her town was quite small, and due to her daughter’s constant Internet conversations about softball and school, she thought she could be found quite easily. Being that her daughter went to the only elementary school in town, a pedophile would have no problem tracing the IP back to the town, and then reading about the school, go there and kidnap her. This is not an exaggeration; these things happen quite often, especially in small rural areas.
The bottom line is, the mother made the right choice. For just a small fee each month, her IP address was changed and now it points to some random location in another state, and changes every thirty minutes just to throw kidnappers off even more. Her daughter is safe and can still surf the Internet and talk freely, and her mother can relax and know her child is browsing anonymously online. Although there are a multitude of ways to protect yourself online, they are all contingent on how often you employ them, and how long you continue to do so. An IP changer will change your IP for just a couple dollars a month, and you know your child’s safety is worth much more than that.
