Anonymous Web Proxy Servers

As soon as someone browses the Internet, the server logs their IP address and based on that the location of the user can be found.

The information such as name, address, phone number, etc. can lead to other vital pieces of information.

This type of information is vital for hackers and predominantly the advertising companies that may present targeted ads.

In essence browsing the Internet would send out information about users that may be used against them or to their disadvantage. For this very reason anonymous web browsing proxy websites that use proxy servers were created.

The browsing habits of users can be easily logged and information such as websites visited, time spent on such websites, products that were purchased, e-mail addresses, etc. can be gathered. Based on these advertising network would send users a lot of junk mails, SPAM, etc.

Anonymous web proxies are type of proxy servers that work by using a web form which is many a times called a CGI proxy.

Rather than configuring a proxy address in the browsers, users would browse to the home page of the free anonymous web proxy or the CGI proxy where each session has been functionally configured to be routed through the anonymous proxy server sitting at the back end.

The users will type in the URL they wish to browse to and the anonymous web proxy server would open the URL within the web page of the web proxy server and display it to the user without revealing the true identity of the users to the actual web servers.

The web proxies hide the true identity of users by keeping cookies on the web server rather on the client’s system, deleting the browsing cache on the web proxy server after each session, and preemptively deleting scripts, images, etc. from the webpage that has been requested by the user.

A very common use of such anonymous web proxy servers is to bypass the content filtering solutions that may be present at the ISP level.

Most of the time such web proxy servers (learn about IP masking with proxy servers) are used by employees of companies where the upstream content filtering solution is blocking sites or by students to bypass the browsing restrictions that have been placed by the administrators of schools.

Anonymous web proxy servers would normally and in most cases accept and support protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS and FTP.

There are thousands of free and commercially available anonymous web proxy servers that users can use to hide their identities while surfing the Internet.

A few examples of such sites are:

http://anonymouse.org/

http://www.anonymizer.com/

http://proxify.com/