How to Get around a Facebook Block at Work, School, or in Other Countries

Facebook has become the way that we communicate with one another. It’s a source for news, entertainment, and interaction with friends and loved ones. Unfortunately, it’s also highly addictive in a number of ways, and going on “just for a minute” can turn into hours if you’re not careful. That’s why a lot of schools, workplaces, and other locales that require you to pay attention to the task at hand tend to use their networks to block access to Facebook so that others cannot just sign in there. They also employ this as a defense against people accidentally leaving their account active in a public place, compromising potentially personal information.

That being said, it’s sometimes necessary to log in. Family emergencies, for example, can have updates easily broadcast through the service and you may want to keep up with what’s going on. You may run a business page and need to check for updates from potential clients. You may live in a repressive country that is trying to prevent you from letting the outside world know what’s going on. There are any number of reasons why it may be vital to check your Facebook while in a place that doesn’t otherwise allow it. Fortunately, there are ways around this block. First, some background on why it works.

How Blocking Works

When somebody sets up a server that they use to access the internet, they usually have quite a bit of control over it. There’s more to it than just buying internet from a local provider and setting up a wireless router. One of the things that they can do is set up a list of “blocked” websites that the server will not communicate with for any number of reasons.

In fact, there are several program suites that block a number of websites by default, either specifically or because they are part of a broad category of websites. Usually this defaults to things like porn sites and hate sites, but often there is also a category for social networking sites so that people are incapable of getting the web server to even try and reach out to them.

How to Avoid Blocking

The problem with blocking this way is that the internet is a very large place with trillions of websites, and it’s very unlikely that you will be able to prevent all of them in any given category from being accessed. If one starts to become popular due to the access it gives, you can expect that it, too, will soon be blocked, but ultimately it doesn’t take much to set up a new website.

Enter the proxy website.

Proxy websites allow you to log on to them, type in the name of another website that you wish to visit, and then bring you to that website as a function of the one that you’re on. The idea is that while Facebook may be blocked, backdoor.com probably isn’t because many webmasters haven’t heard of it. So, you go to Backdoor, or Mirror Proxy, or any number of other proxy websites that aren’t blocked, and they allow you to then access the website that you want through them.

Things to Avoid

The problems with this are twofold. The first is that once it becomes clear the proxy website that people are using, that website will also be blocked, though you may have up to a few months or longer if you keep quiet about what you’re doing. The other problem is that not all proxy websites can be trusted to not capture your personal information while you’re using them.

If you plan to use a proxy website to avoid a block, first makes sure that the website in question has a good reputation. The great thing about the internet is that if a website is engaging in shady practices, there are usually reports about it very quickly.

Also, make sure that you log off of your account when you’re done using it. The most common way for people to access Facebook accounts that aren’t theirs is to simply find an account that hasn’t been properly closed in a public place.

There are usually very good reasons for Facebook to be blocked, but extenuating circumstances mean that sometimes you have to ignore those rules in order to deal with something important. In cases like that, there are options for you.