Why I Would Never Use the Free Proxy Sites in 2009

So what's wrong with using free proxy sites to protect your privacy in 2009? Well there's nothing wrong with the price, free is definitely best but in reality you get what you pay for. It takes money to run a proxy site, bandwidth costs are not cheap and maintaining hosting and a secure proxy server comes at a cost. If you are looking for a free proxy site to remain anonymous and protect your identity this is even more important.

So who Generously Supplies the Free Proxy Sites?

There are a few genuine anonymous proxy servers which can be used for free with great results - they are fast, secure and easy to use. However you will never find these on the free proxy lists you find on web sites floating about the internet. As soon as an anonymous proxy server appears on these lists the support and bandwidth costs explode and any legitimate server will become unusable. These lists (and the reason why they are constantly updated) contain proxies that have generally 'appeared' on the internet - usually as a result of an administrators mistake or it's a hacked server which has had a proxy installed for use by everyone.

This is the reason that new proxy servers appearing on these lists are so prized, initially the servers may run at a respectable speed until half the internet proxy list seekers jump on board and the bandwidth plummets. When the bandwidth limits are reached the proxy server will seeks to work and the embarrassed administrator will usually realise his mistake or the hackers will move on to another target.

There are some rarer but much scarier free proxies that appear on these lists. One other way of financing the high costs of running a free anonymous proxy is to actually make money from these servers.

You may have seen free web based proxies where you type in a URL and they fetch the page back, these normally have adverts or pop-ups to finance them. The more worrying ones look extremely legitimate and are often fast and well run, mainly because they are financed by identity thieves who are sniffing all the data that is passing through. That's probably the most worrying aspect of using free proxies, you are sending ALL your data using a clear text transport mechanism (HTTP) via a server of extremely dubious origins. The security benefits of protecting your IP address from the web servers you visit are minimal anyway but the risks are actually quite large to your identity.

There is no way I would every use one from the free proxy sites in 2009, I personally think you're safer without them - however I do protect my identity online.

To see which software I use to protect my web browsing - you can read about Identity Cloaker here.

Surf safely, protect your privacy,

Jim

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jim_Rjindael

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