
HideMyAss is one of the best known free proxies, and it also offers a VPN service (although we didn’t rate it very highly With that in mind, we wouldn’t recommend using a proxy service for regular browsing – you’re better off with a VPN – but if you only want to get around a web filter on a few specific occasions, a free proxy could be the easiest option. There are free public proxies, but many have aīad reputation for collecting or selling user data, inserting ads into web pages, or stripping away encryption. If you care about privacy, you also want to make sure that you find one that uses HTTPS encryption – that’s the only way to have your traffic encrypted. The easiest-to-use proxies simply run as a browser extension, but that also means that only the traffic from your browser will be routed through the proxy – not from any other apps or services. But they can also often be used to avoid local content filters by circumventing them, hopefully allowing you to browse the web freely. Proxies are often used by people hoping to access region-locked content like That might be fine if you just want to quickly visit a website or watch a video, but there are some downsides to a proxy specifically concerning privacy and security. It doesn’t encrypt all web traffic, either, and typically only changes your IP address to make it seem like you’re in the region where the content is viewable. your web browser or torrent application) rather than your whole connection. Like a VPN, it routes your traffic through another sever, but unlike a VPN it tends to only work with specific applications (e.g. Access blocked websites with a proxyĪnother way to get around a block is to use a proxy service. This means you need to create an account with your chosen VPN provider first. Because each device is different, that’s not something we can cover here in detail, but you’ll need various details including the server address, your username, password and certain other information. But on many devices, including phones, you can manually configure a VPN connection in the operating system’s settings.
