Surfing Anonymously Free of Charge?

So is it possible? Can you actually surf anonymously for free ?

Well it certainly is but it generally relies on a huge amount of patience or ‘knowing the right people’. Let’s look at some basic option which can help you gain some element of privacy to your browsing. The majority of the Internet Privacy market is focussed on keeping your history cleared from your web browser and the anonymous proxy solutions which stop the website you visit recording your IP address.

Lets look at some of the options for free anonymous proxies briefly.

There are many web based free anonymous proxies out there on the web. What they basically do is route your url request through their own or one of many free proxies on the internet.

So basically you type in the url you wish to view and the proxy goes to fetch it for you. It works reasonably well for most sites but you’ll often get problems with SSL and complicated sites.

It is very important that you realise that running anonymous proxies is very expensive so the owner will need to fund these in some way. The majority of web based anonymous proxies have lots of adverts on their main page, and then will usually serve adverts in frames or pop ups in the web pages you visit.

If you can live with this annoyance and the very slow speed they are a useful little tool for bypassing country restrictions and protecting your IP address from the target web server.

Remember though all your details (including IP address are now additionally logged on the proxy you use, the ISP still logs everything and your communication is still in ‘clear text HTTP’. You can’t really surf anonymously for free using these proxies, you’re just changing who knows all your information from the target web server to the free proxy server you are using.