Proxies handle all of your internet traffic and acts as an intermediary between your device and the internet. Your IP address will be hidden from any website you visit and those websites will only be able to see the proxy server’s IP address.
Using a proxy would bring tons of benefits and enable you to do a lot of use cases that you wouldn’t normally be able to.
There are many types of proxies, each having its own distinct function. Generally though, a big benefit of a proxy and one of the main reasons that people actually use proxies, is the enhanced security and online privacy you will get when using it.
One type of proxy that doesn’t give the benefit of improving your privacy though are Free proxies, also known as Open proxies. As its name suggests, these are free services for proxies that anyone can acquire.
You don’t have to purchase it from anyone and you can use it anytime. As the old idiom goes though, “You get what you pay for”.
Risks When Utilizing Free Proxies
The quality of a product or service would be proportional to its price. The higher or lower you pay for a product or service, the quality of it will also change.
So, what’s the quality of something that’s free? It should be the lowest quality there can be and that’s what free proxy ips are. It’s slow and unreliable and there really isn’t a time where it’s recommended to use it.
If you do use proxies from free proxy lists, the biggest risk you will face is the high probability of your data being stolen and identity theft occurring. Even if they’re free, setting up and maintaining the proxy server costs money and it isn’t easy to do.
They have to collect some profit and these websites do it by stealing your data and selling it to interested parties.
Stealing your sensitive information is pretty simple to do when using free web proxies because free proxy servers only use HTTP connections which don't encrypt any of your internet traffic. Your personal data, like your login credentials for a website and your bank or credit card information, can be easily stolen by hackers or anyone else with internet access.
Another good example of a risk you take would be that the free proxy server you’re using may contain malicious malware that would modify the HTML and the javascript of the website that you’re browsing.
This can specifically target the ads that show on a website and you can even be redirected to another site with lots of ads when you want to visit a website.
Benefits of Paid Proxy Services
The proxies you use should be sourced from a reliable proxy provider that has been tried and tested by many users. It’s best to do your own research when choosing a proxy service.
In the event that you do find a trustworthy proxy service that you like, then the benefits you would gain would be immense. For example:
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You would get access to millions of IP addresses from various locations throughout the world from their proxy pool.
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The proxies you use are reliable and would perform most of the time.
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You would have a strong and secure connection to the server.
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You can be assured that your personal information would remain private.
Conclusion
Using free proxies would give you a lot of risks for little return. Your information will probably get stolen and you won’t be even getting that good of a service. If you’re thinking of using a free VPN, it would still yield the same results as a Free proxy.
So, it’s always recommended to get your proxies from a reliable proxy service like Geonode. It’s always recommended to do your own research when finding a trustworthy proxy provider and decide for yourself what’s best for you but why don’t you give Geonode a try?
