Advantages of a Proxy

When the term anonymous surfing is heard, the more common perception is that this is associated with malicious hacking or downloading and other negative intentions. The truth is that there are legitimate reasons why anonymous surfing through proxies.

A proxy is needed when your school or your employer has strict and unreasonable Internet access policies. It is needed when you want to freely exercise your freedom of speech to express your views about some government or societal issues and you want to be shielded for possible harassment or tracking by people who may be offended with your opinion.

A proxy is needed to exercise your right to conduct your business without intrusion by anybody. It is also very useful when you are out of the country and you need to access content that is restricted only to your country. Also, you need a proxy to shield you from being used by search engine in gathering information from your site. Or, you simply need a proxy to hide from advertisers who are interested to know where you are located and what kinds of products you are buying.

There are many legitimate reasons why a proxy is needed. The sometimes unreasonable filtering of keywords accessed in school or at work can prevent a person from being more productive as sites like useful pages and glossaries are sometimes affected by unnecessary filtering. An example of a content filter used by companies is Websense. It is a web filter application that limits end users from accessing specific Internet sites. It started in 1994 and has now become one of the popular software packages for the purpose.

With a proxy site, useful and valid assistance can be derived without having to call the school or company technical support. This allows you to get rid of this time-consuming step of getting authorization to access a valid site.

Further, because there are countries that block their citizens from getting outside information from the Internet, the use of proxies can allow them to get in touch with the world and know what is going on.

The good thing about proxy sites is that the IP address of the user is not recorded. This allows the anonymity and privacy of the user. It can even allow you to eliminate images and advertisements.