Your legal opinion....are proxy sites legal or not ? What are their legal implications ? I mean if someone should not be doing what they should be doing with the site ie Defrauding ebay or the likes and in effect doing it with your IP address.....are there ever come backs ? How do you deal with it ? Thanx for your opinion...
I personally know that eBay threatened and fined one proxy owner because a whole bunch of hackers used his proxy for 16 hours one day and scammed a whole bunch of people. He posted on the forum and I think he had to reimburse the effected people to the tune of about $600. As far as legal implications, they usually forgive the owner if they are at least trying to ban the preverts and pedophiles. Setup a terms of service and review what your people are doing. You can also really help yourself by only advertising yourself as a way to get to games or myspace from work or school.
Ebay is full of it. They have a bunch of pinheads in their abuse department firing off spammy canned threats to web hosts. I had a complaint by some idiot at ebay who didn't understand what the concept of a web proxy even was and accused me of being a phishing site. My host, LT, got intimidated and shut my server down. I doubt they can sue you though, since you aren't knowingly allowing anything and no laws prevent you from providing proxy services either. The only thing I would do is keep logs just in case law enforcement requests them. You are now legally required to log I believe, not sure though.
i never knew any of this.as a newcomer to the proxy site biz,i kinda wondered if there was any legal ramifications
have a water tight aup/tos and you should be safe or you can work un the isp act in which you do not monitor/moderate user hence you have no knowledge about what they are doing so you should be safe.
From what I understand, proxy sites do not require anyone to sign up so the TOS/AUP although good, it probably not going to go very far. In the end, you may not know who is the one violating the TOS. Then your IP address will be shown as the user who visit those sites or do those illegal stuff. If you really want to run it, it might not be a bad idea to use a dedicated ip for the proxy site so that it does not affect the other sites on the server and they can be tracked back to your proxy site instead of the other sites sharing the same IP. Some web hosts will shut down the sites or ban access from the offending IP (your's proxy) and it may affect the access to the other sites.
Does anyone here mention in their proxy ToS something like "all activity on this server is logged"? What do you think might be the repercussions of mentioning this? I think it would encourage the pond-life to move on to another proxy, but not intimidate legitimate users. Any thoughts?
Whoa. So it is illlegal to own a proxy server??? I wouldn't pay anyone a goddamn cent! I'd like ebay to try and come after me for that money. I don't know much about hosting a proxy server but how did ebay track him down? If there is even a chance ppl are getting fined for having a proxy server I'm pretty certain there's ways to keep yourself anonymous.