If you’ve discovered pornography on your husband’s phone or computer, you may feel powerless, overwhelmed, and angry.
You may also be wondering how you, from this moment on, can protect your home from porn.
Tony Perez, cofounder of Clean Browsing, joins Anne on the free BTR Podcast to empower mothers who are striving to create a porn-free home. Women cannot control the choices of their abusive husbands, but with a filtering service like Clean Browsing, women can limit the amount of pornographic material entering their home. Read the full transcript below and listen to the free BTR podcast for more.
Clean Browsing Was Created With Kids in Mind
Tony Perez and cofounder Daniel created Clean Browsing because they wanted their own children to have freedom to use the internet without the ever-present danger of pornographic material.
One of the big things that we were placing a lot of emphasis on was the amount of pornography and obscene content that was available, and it was presenting itself in all forms. It was presenting itself in forums, it was presenting itself in YouTube channels, on social media, and as technologists we wanted our kids to enjoy the web, but we wanted to kind of introduce a few guardrails. Something that would give us peace of mind that while they were on, we were kind of protecting them from the things that we didn’t feel were appropriate for them at the time. And since then, it’s kind of just evolved. So, at the time, it was like, hey, how do we create a safer, cleaner web for our kids?
Tony Perez, Clean Browsing cofounder
Clean Browsing Is User-Friendly
Often, traumatized women feel overwhelmed at the thought of installing or performing new technological tasks or apps. The fog of abuse and the trauma of betrayal condition women to feel like they aren’t intelligent enough to try new things.
Clean Browsing understands that trauma victims need simple, easy, and user-friendly services.
Additionally, Clean Browsing staff are readily available to answer your questions and guide you through the setup process.
Clean Browsing Works!
Anne Blythe, founder of Betrayal Trauma Recovery, uses Clean Browsing in her own home. She shares:
I can’t recommend it enough. I’ve been using it for years in my home and I have absolutely loved it. I don’t even notice it. All I notice is that, you know, when I look up images on Google, we never get porn.
Anne Blythe, founder of Betrayal Trauma Recovery
Using a filtering service like Clean Browsing can help you protect your children from the pernicious pornographic material that is, sadly, readily available on the internet.
Betrayal Trauma Recovery Is Here For You
At BTR, we understand how devastating it is to discover pornography in your home.
But we know that you have the inner strength to rise above your trauma and protect your children. The Betrayal Trauma Recovery Group meets every single day in every single time zone so that you can get the support you need as you begin your journey to healing and peace.
You can do this. Check out this free service that Clean Browsing offers and leave us a comment below letting us know how it’s working for you.
Full Transcript:
Anne: Welcome to Betrayal Trauma Recovery, this is Anne.
I have Tony Perez, one of the cofounders of Clean Browsing on today’s episode, but before we get to that, thank you to those of you who have given the podcast a five-star rating on Apple podcast or other podcasting apps. Here’s a five-star rating we recently received, it says: Freedom through truth. Amazing wisdom with these folks and a true help for those whose world has been ripped apart by betrayal and or porn. Highly recommended! I only wish I had them sooner. Thank you.
Betrayal Trauma Recovery Is Here For You
If you haven’t already and you’re so inclined, please leave a five-star review with your feelings about the podcast on Apple Podcasts. I love reading them, it really is humbling to me and also inspirational. I’m so grateful that you’re taking part in this community and that you’re here and you’re listening and I’m grateful for your support.
Betrayal Trauma Recovery Group is our daily online live support group, where you can talk to real people who really get it. You can attend anywhere. We’re here for you all the time, we don’t take a vacation. We’re always here. We hope to see you in a session today.
Tony Perez From Clean Browsing
I have Tony Perez on today’s episode. He was born in Miami, Florida. He’s a Colombian Cuban American living in Temecula, California, and a father to three, and a husband to one. He is a Marine Corps veteran, having done two tours in Iraq between 2002 and 2005, with a total in-country time of a year and a half. He’s committed the past 20 years to navigating various technology industries, investing heavily in information security. Today, Tony is one of the founders at Clean Browsing. He holds an undergraduate degree in technology management from the American Military University and has a graduate degree in Business Administration with an emphasis on technology management. Welcome, Tony.
Tony: Hey.
Clean Browsing Was Created With Kids In Mind
Anne: Before we started our interview, Tony actually helped me get Clean Browsing set up on my router and he’s showing me all the cool new features that they have come out within the last few years since we interviewed his cofounder, Daniel, a few years ago. Let’s start with you talking about why you decided to get involved with clean browsing.
Tony: Everything started in 2016 with my partner, Daniel. We were partners in another tech startup that we ended up selling, but this kind of started as we’re kind of walking around the building. In the parking lot, we were kind of talking about the challenges we were having at home, and at the time, there weren’t a lot of good solutions for our own kids. And so what we wanted to do was find a way to take better control of the things that our kids were doing online, while allowing them to be online, without us having to look over their shoulders.
Clean Browsing Acts As A “Guardrail” For Kids
One of the big things that we were placing a lot of emphasis on was the amount of pornography and obscene content that was available, and it was presenting itself in all forms. It was presenting itself in forums, it was presenting itself in YouTube channels, on social media, and as technologists we wanted our kids to enjoy the web, but we wanted to kind of introduce a few guardrails. Something that would give us peace of mind that while they were on, we were kind of protecting them from the things that we didn’t feel were appropriate for them at the time. And since then, it’s kind of just evolved. So, at the time, it was like, hey, how do we create a safer, cleaner web for our kids? And then, in the process, we’ve kind of bumped into a number of different adjacent domains that we never considered around online addictions, whether that’s pornography, whether that’s gambling, whether it’s social media, etc. So that’s kind of how I got involved with this.
What Makes Clean Browsing Different?
Anne: So, a lot of people have set up sort of guardrails through their router with open DNS. Can you tell us the difference between clean browsing and say just the typical DNS settings?
Tony: Yeah, definitely. I mean I have this conversation a lot with a lot of organizations that are trying to differentiate us from others and what I like to tell them is very simple. It’s like look, technically, we’re very similar. We function at the DNS level and so we look at all the requests that come in and we intercept them, and we define what is acceptable based on whatever policies you’ve implemented, but I think the thing that helps differentiate us and sets us aside, is really our focus. We grew out of a focus for children. We grew out of the focus for our own specific children. Both Daniel and I have three kids, and they have become what we consider to be our superset. For us, kids are perhaps the slyest, trickiest little foxes that we know of. In fact, if you look at the clean browsing emblem, you’ll notice that it’s a little fox, that’s Willie the Fox, and Willie the Fox is designed to remind us of who it is we’re targeting.
Clean Browsing Was Created For Kids
If you look across the website you see a lot of kids on the website and again, those are all reminders for us. Now, why is that so important? Well, that is what helps us differentiate ourselves. That is the thing that keeps us up at night, it’s the thing that helps us continue to be competitive and why we’re one of the most effective solutions for online pornography. What that translates to is that our detection rates are higher, our effectiveness is higher. We’re not a large enterprise. We’re not a large conglomerate. What that means is that this creating a safe browsing experience for somebody’s home networks or somebody’s business is not secondary to us. We’re not a Cisco, with a number of different functional units within the organization, everyone competing for resources. This is what we do day in and day out.
Clean Browsing Is A Transparent Organization
I think that a lot of organizations are switching towards this especially a lot of schools, a lot of parents, and a lot of adults that are struggling with this are doing so because they’re finding the effectiveness in our solution. The other thing that really helps us be competitive, is that we’ve essentially crowdsourced our detection rates. So, we have a site called categorify.org, and it’s something that we’re very transparent about and this categorify.org allows anybody to check the detection of a site. If somebody feels that categorization is incorrect or being too lenient or being too strict, they have the ability to contact us directly, send us the links, and typically within a 24-hour period update our engines accordingly.
This crowdsourcing approach is very, very different than anybody else in the market, and what that allows us to do is that we have hundreds, thousands, millions of people accessing categorify.org on a daily basis and updating our engines. We then use a machine learning engine on top of that, which helps us kind of propagate a little bit faster, but that’s on the technical side. What’s really important is the crowdsourcing aspect of how we do our filtration and how we do our updating to our signatures in our backend.
Trauma Mama Husband Drama Helps You Protect Your Kids
Anne: We’re going to take a break for just a second to talk about Trauma Mama Husband Drama, which is my picture book for adults.
Thank you, those of you who have purchased the book and then gone back to leave a five-star rating. Here’s a five-star rating we received on amazon. It says: Explains your trauma in 60 seconds. I currently have 20 plus books about narcissistic abuse. This one tops the list for getting to the heart of the matter in one minute. It’s particularly good for the church-going family where the husband is betraying his wife by using porn. She can hand this book to others who don’t understand, and they will get it.
Help Women Find Betrayal Trauma Recovery
When you purchase the book please remember to go back to Amazon and leave a five-star rating because every single one of your ratings helps isolated women find us. If they find us on Amazon, even if they don’t purchase the book, it directs them to this podcast which is free for everyone. Thank you to those who helped get the word out by reviewing, posting, sharing any content from Betrayal Trauma Recovery. Each time you do you help a woman who is isolated get the information that she needs.
What Is Clean Browsing?
Today you were awesome to set this up for me on my router, and I have used Clean Browsing for the past few years with absolute great success and completely 100% recommend it for our listeners especially to protect their children at home. Without getting too technical, can you tell them basically what clean browsing is?
Tony: The way I explained to like my wife and family stuff like that, as you know, we essentially just filter content. We believe in an open web. We also believe in a world in which parents specifically should have more control around what is and is not accessible to their kids, especially when they’re under 13-14 years old when they’re just kind of in those formative years. So, what we essentially do is allow you to dictate what you want to be accessible on your internet. So, if you don’t want Facebook to be accessible, then you can say, I don’t want Facebook to be accessible. If you don’t want Twitter or Instagram or Pinterest or pornography or other forms of obscene content. We believe in a parent’s right to say that that should not be accessible on their internet, not just for their kids, but for anybody else that may be visiting their environment, their home whether that’s a kid’s friend where they’re having a sleepover, etc., and so that’s what we are. We are a content filtering service. Our effectiveness comes in how it’s implemented in the specific technologies that we use, but at its core, that’s what we are. We’re just empowering users to take control of the internet.
How Does Clean Browsing Work?
Anne: Right, and this happens on the router level.
Tony: Yeah, so you can actually deploy this in a couple of different environments. So, the router is the mechanism that connects a home or an environment to the outside world, right. That’s how you access the internet, but we recognize that people and parents, and users leave their homes, right. They have mobile devices etc., and so there’s a lot of new technologies now that allow them to take us with them. So, if you’re on an iOS or your Android device, you have the ability to use some of the latest features that Android and iOS have released. On iOS devices, we actually have an app. An app that will easily configure and deploy for you, and then on the Android devices, it’s a little bit more complicated because of the different kinds and types of androids that exist.
So, the easiest way is to use the private DNS option that they make available to you in settings. What’s really cool is that we have a lot of documentation on how to do this. The power of this is that you can then take Clean Browsing with you anywhere you go. So, as you said, if you’re on this router, and you’re connected to the internet through your router then it’s been applied, but the minute you leave essentially those rules disappear, but if you want your rules to apply to whatever devices a user has. You do have the option to configure DNS at the local level, it doesn’t have to just happen at the router level.
Clean Browsing Is Compatible With All Of Your Devices
Anne: And when you say local level, you mean like per device?
Fony: That’s correct. Whether that’s a desktop or notebook, an iOS device, or an Android device, doesn’t matter.
Anne: Okay, and this is by putting the app on each of your devices?
Tony: Yeah. So, it’s a combination so you can either be using the app if an app exists, or it could also be by setting the DNS locally. What everyone needs to remember is that almost any device that connects to the internet makes use of DNS, and the DNS option exists in almost every device in the same location. It’s typically in the settings, somewhere around the network, and advanced. It doesn’t matter if it’s a PlayStation 4, it doesn’t matter if it’s a TV, it doesn’t matter if it’s some form of IoT devices like a camera or something along those lines. If it connects to the internet, there’s always going to be a settings page and there’s always going to be a network page, and on that page is typically where you’re going to find DNS. So, even if an app does not exist, you have the ability to usually update the DNS, in the device.
You Can Bring Clean Browsing With You, Wherever You Go
Anne: Okay, so I just while we were talking, went to the App Store on my Apple phone and I downloaded the Clean Browsing app, and I think I just connected it. I pushed connect it says Clean Browsing active via network configuration. Would that mean that this Clean Browsing is active if I leave my home now?
Tony: That’s correct, and what it’ll also mean is probably using one of the family or the adult filters and what you’ll want to do is, you’ll want to go to your Clean Browsing page and on your Clean Browsing page, you’ll get a little code. That code is what you’re going to type into the custom filter, and on a custom filter what that will then do is it’ll apply your filters to that device, not just our free services.
Clean Browsing Is Simple To Install And Use
Anne: Okay, I’m going do that right this very second, just so people can see that it’s not that hard because I think one of the things that hold people back, is that it just seems so overwhelming. So, if a woman just found out that her husband’s using porn that’s overwhelming in and of itself. What do I do, how do I deal with this emotionally, can I stop him, can I not, what are my next steps? For that, we have our checklist for women to start taking steps toward getting to emotional safety in their own homes, which is the most important thing.
So, they’re overwhelmed with that, they’re overwhelmed thoughts like: am I going have to get a divorce, how am I going protect all these things? So sometimes, setting up something on their router, or putting an app on their phone just seems way too overwhelming, but I want to say I just did this just now during this interview, just barely on my phone. So, I’m like, oh, setting this up on other devices that use outside internet, that can use mobile data so that my kids don’t turn off the Wi-Fi part and then they’re on mobile data and then they can just get whatever they want. I just sent it up on my phone and it was crazy easy, so that’s great.
Clean Browsing Is Committed To Providing Great Service
Tony: Well, it is. And we’re constantly trying to make it faster. Trust me. Daniel and I recognize all the time that what’s easy for us is not necessarily easy for everyone. We work with a lot of spouses. We work with a lot of parents. We understand their struggles. So what I can say is over the next 6-12 months, we’re going to continue to streamline this process and try to take out as much of the technical aspects and make it as seamless as possible for users. It’s just always challenging with the number of devices that are out there, difficult sites, things like that, but it’s one of the things we’re committed to, because we realize how important this is for users.
If trying to create a safe browsing experience is something that’s really important to you and cost is an issue that’s okay, we actually have a free service that users can access. We have three distinct free services- a security filter, an adult filter, and a family filter, and each of those filters, won’t give you access to a dashboard, but they will filter the content so that you can kind of retake control of your internet and strip out a lot of malicious pornography obscene content that sort of stuff. So, don’t be overwhelmed by potential costs if that’s an issue, there are free options available to you.
Anne: Awesome. Check out Clean Browsing today.
“I Can’t Recommend It Enough”
Definitely, at the very, least set up their free options. But they also have amazing options for their paid service. It’s very inexpensive. I can’t recommend it enough. I’ve been using it for years in my home. I have absolutely loved it. I don’t even notice it. All I notice is that, you know, when I look up images for example like an image search on Google, we never get porn. I mean, I have never seen an image come up with anybody naked on it, so I assume that’s probably from Clean Browsing.
And when we talk about protecting our kids it’s sort of layers of Swiss cheese a little bit, you know. You need to have ongoing layered conversations perhaps some accountability software. There are lots of different options for you, but I would say at the very least, the Clean Browsing free option is the easiest, simplest, least expensive option for you and if you don’t know where to start that is an excellent start. So, thank you so much, Tony, for sharing today.
Clean Browsing Supports Victims of Betrayal
.Tony: Absolutely. My pleasure. We’re very open here so if they ever have any questions, even if they’re not using our paid platforms, we’re helping people get configured, even on the free platforms. Just the same as I did with you. We set up a TeamViewer account, downloaded, created ID, password. I log in, I set it up and then we move on. They also have a community where they can go and they can ask questions and engage and get answers to their questions, things like that. So, yeah. Anything we could do to help just let us know.
Anne: Yeah. Well, for our listeners this is by far the easiest experience I’ve ever had. It’s easier than any other filtering option. It’s so easy. I really appreciate the partnership that Betrayal Trauma Recovery has with Clean Browsing and the amazing work they do. So, thank you so much for coming on today.
Support the BTR Podcast
If this podcast is helpful to you, please support it. If you have found Clean Browsing to be helpful, please share this article, perhaps on Facebook or other social media platforms. Tag it, you know, whatever you can to help get the word out for women to know how to protect their families from pornography, and also how to get information about what to do if their spouse is using pornography, through Betrayal Trauma Recovery. We really are the experts on this. We’re so grateful for your support. We’re so grateful for all of the women who listen and support us. Until next week, stay safe out there.
