Hey, Do I Really Need a Proxy?

Not the most literary impressive title for an article about proxies, but it’s a question I get asked a lot. In real life I get asked when people want to surf anonymously, but mostly through my proxy web sites and blogs.

I want to explain what people use proxies for including some of the less well know ones.

Ok so I’ll start with the main two reasons, these are mostly from (but definitely not exclusively younger surfers). You can use the proxy, to avoid firewalls and web surfing restrictions at school, work or college. Generally these will be the social networking sites like facebook, Myspace etc which will be blocked in companies and schools.

The next reason will be they have been blocked from some forum or blog somewhere, something will have happened and the administrator will have blocked the IP address they were using when posting to the forum. If you use a proxy, your own IP address is shielded and any ban will be bypassed.

But there are many more arguably legitimate reasons for using a proxy, perhaps one of the main ones is that of privacy.  That IP address can be traced directly to your account and the computer you are using. So as you visit a web site, they record your visit, plus the ISP keep a log as well. Of course many people are not very happy about this and if they want to protect their privacy they’ll use a proxy server.

There are many more reasons but I’ll finish on a growing use which is to circumvent the use of geotargeting.  This is the process where the content you are allowed access to is dependent upon what country you are from. So many media sites like

BBC Iplayer, NBC, Hulu and ABC are blocked unless your IP address originates from the USA. For instance, most UK TV stations are only accessible online if you are in the UK. All these restrictions can be bypassed, using for example a Uk proxies for the BBC, if they are configured correctly.