Why You Won't Find a High Anonymity Proxy on the Free Proxy Lists

If you are looking for a high anonymity proxy to allow you to surf in private and protect your identity online then it can be tempting to just latch on to one of the many free proxy lists and simply use one of them. In practice this is often a very frustrating experience as these free proxies are often completely overloaded and extremely slow. Now I don't know about you but I have no real yearning for the days of surfing the web down a 28.8k modem but the reality can be very similar using one of these free proxies.

The reason is not very difficult to see, bandwidth is expensive and running a fast secure proxy server is an extremely costly business. To offer this service for free obviously will quickly use up lots of badnwidth and server resources.

Have you ever wondered why these people supply free proxy servers ?

I mean it's very generous of them to supply a valuable resource like this but you must wonder why they are incurring this expense for no gain. Well the answer is surprisingly simple - the vast majority of these so called anonymous proxies are either hacked or misconfigured servers and the real owners have no idea that they are being used like this. In fact often the first time the administrators realise their mistake is when they see their network statistics or bandwidth charges - ouch !

Now of course it is possible that you are willing to overlook this fact and still happily use the free proxy servers but don't expect speed and certainly don't expect any level of anonymity. These servers are usually inheritently insecure and in fact often the proxy service is actually installed by hackers or identity thieves in order to intercept passwords and logins. Just remember all your data is going through one place with a proxy server, the administrator has potentially complete access to everything that goes down that connection.

In fact the problem is far from being a high anonymity proxy server these free proxies are just about the most insecure way of surfing the web. Sure, you'll protect your identity from the web server you visit but not from anyone else and maybe you are really unlucky and pick one of the free hacked proxies run by Eastern European Hacking groups !

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

If you want to read about some of my thoughts on using anonymous proxies and general privacy issues on free speech please visit my new blog here Anonymous Surfing Proxies

Surf safely, protect your privacy,

Jim