Since free proxies aren’t the best choice most of the time, what should you choose? It, of course, depends on your use-case. Since free proxies are blacklisted quickly from many targets, they may not be of great use to you, and you might want to look at their alternatives. The proxies get used a lot for the website by other people, and they get blocked from accessing it.The websites can do this with services such as MaxMind. Since the proxies are public for everyone, this is very easy to detect. The websites use a service to detect proxy usage.Blacklisting of public proxiesĪnother huge problem with public proxies is that they get blacklisted very quickly from known websites. It is estimated that the median lifespan of a free proxy is only seven days long. As a result, most open proxies’ lifespan is very short since it is very resource-intensive to operate one. Research done by the University of Washington estimates that each public proxy could be using up to 300 MB of data per second. Additional problems with public proxies Public proxy lifespanĪs you already know, public proxies get used by a tremendous amount of users this causes a lot of load on the proxy servers. Some of the modifications that proxies make might be more malicious than others. When you use a public proxy, you must stay aware that the proxy you are using might be modifying what you see on the website. Collecting user information such as location, email, phone number.Luckily only 5.15% are malicious.įorms of non-malicious proxy content modification:įorms of malicious proxy content modification: Research shows that 38.21% of all HTTP proxies perform some sort of content modification. People who host a proxy can modify the content you see when visiting a website. When you want to stay anonymous, make sure to only use elite proxies! Traffic manipulation & modification Only 39% of the shared proxies are elite and will not reveal any traces to your target that you are hiding behind a proxy. 6% of the public HTTP proxies are anonymous and will show to the target that you are connected via a proxy. Transparent proxies will show your original IP address to the target. Analytics on the public HTTP proxies that we have checked show that at least 55% of the proxies are transparent. Transparent proxies are a significant problem when it comes to free proxies, especially with HTTP proxies. Elite proxy: hides both your IP address and the fact that you are using a proxy server at all.Anonymous proxy: hides your IP address but does reveal that you are using a proxy server.Transparent proxy: does not hide your IP Address.
There are three types of anonymity levels: Proxy anonymity levelsįor some people, proxy anonymity matters a great deal because they do not want their original identity revealed.
In this article, we will go more in-depth into how public proxies might be unsafe to use. In most cases, you will be better off with alternatives such as datacenter proxies or residential proxies, which are maintained by professionals with no malicious intent. They can be malicious in various ways, such as by injecting ads, tracking your activities, and logging your data such as phone numbers, emails, and location. This is because free proxies do not always provide the anonymity you did expect while browsing the internet and might be malicious. We here at ProxyScrape have been providing a free proxy list for quite a while now, but admittingly we have to say that free proxies aren’t always safe to use.