One way to protect your self online when surfing the internet is by using a secure proxy server. But just picking any proxy to use is not advisable, as you might pick one that is not secure and instead of your surfing being anonymous your information might just be being sent somewhere else, which can make this a bad situation for you. More and more the world and especially the internet are full of people who are waiting to steal your identity. These internet pirates are not just a single person, but they are an entire huge team that has tons of resources and they realize the huge gains that can be gotten, with very limited risks of getting caught for electronic fraud and theft.

Sad but true, the risks for these thieves are so minimal compared to any conventional crime and even lessens when they set themselves up in a country with lax internet laws and with a government that cannot police the situation. As the internet continues to grow by leaps and bounds, the rewards for these identity thieves will continue to grow as well.

One of the basic and most important issue while surfing the web is that most information is transferred in easily readable format, called ascii text. So basically all information that leaves your computer and travels across the internet can be instantly intercepted and read by anyone who chooses to do so. One place that all internet information is intercepted is your ISP, who logs everything everyone does online, along with many other places. So to keep what you do online private many people will use a free anonymous proxy. What this means to you as a user of the internet is that these internet pirates can either buy, rent or even hack into a server and then install their own proxy server and then put them on the internet, advertising them as free secure proxy servers for the general public to use.

Each and every day thousands of people use these proxies and unknowing to them all their data is being intercepted and read. With a server configured to cache mode and enabling software these internet pirates can record everything ... your usernames, account logins and passwords, your credit card details, social security number, you name it and they have your information. So they not only give you what you think will protect you, but they are providing themselves with a way to steal all your information in the name of anonymity!

You have probably heard the saying ... "there is no such thing as a free lunch", well that holds true with free proxies as well. The cost to run a free proxy server is very expensive, so why would they want to give them away free to the public? The answer here is pretty simple, it is one of two reasons ... #1 being that someone, more than likely a company did not close all the ports to their proxy server or ... #2 it has been done by someone on purpose to create a trap to steal peoples data

You want to be extremely careful when choosing to use a secure proxy server and that it is from a reputable company that runs a secure professional server. Not a free service that could very well be run by a team of Eastern European hackers, with only one motive in mind.

Personally I would not know how to find out whether a reputable company is running a proxy server or if it was hackers, but there is a very good privacy software out on the market now that will allow you to surf and buy safely online. You will have access to a large network of private proxies to use; the program itself is fast and completely encrypted, allowing you worry free surfing. There is no better, it is the best on the market.