There are lots of proxies available on the Internet but which ones are the best. How do we distinguish from reliable and trustworthy proxies from ones that are unreliable and do not work. There are several steps that we can go to determine which ones work and which do not. The first step is to determine where the proxy is being hosted. Ideally, you want it to be hosted in a jurisdiction that offers tight privacy laws and protects you from snoops. Most countries like the US and places in the EU do not have this and data privacy is severely compromised.

One of the best options to go for would be Panama or Guatemala. Both of these places have privacy laws in place to protect you from snoops. This means data help on you by companies in these countries are safe from foreign authorities. The only way someone could get at your records would be to get a court order from a Judge in the country in question. This is very rare and Panama is very reluctant about sharing information with other countries. Once we have established that the proxy is being hosted ina country that protects your data we then have to establish the reliability of the site its self. Check forums, newsgroups, yahoo groups etc to get an idea of how good and reliable a proxy is.

If you have not yet found a proxy to examine just go to Google and type in proxy website. You will get thousands of results and endless of sites for you to choose from. The important thing is to use a reliable one. Sometimes proxies actually do the opposite of what they make out to. Sometimes their owners have bad intent and will launch attacks on your computer in the form of viruses and spyware. This does happen and I have known it to happen to friends of mine so you must be careful.

If you are worried about virus attacks when using proxies then there are things you can do to keep yourself safe. First of all make sure that your Windows firewall is enabled. Secondly, make sure that you have a good antivirus product installed and that it has regular updates. There are so many viruses and threats on the Internet that weekly updates are not good enough. Two to three times per week is not the safest.

By the way, if you are looking for an even better privacy solution then invest in a product that offers encryption as one of its features. Ok, this may not come cheap but it will be well worth it to protect you from hackers and unwanted intrusions into your computer or computer network. I hope you can use what I have briefly discussed and it helps you have a safer and more enjoyable browsing experience. There are millions of proxies available and finding the right one to meet your needs is not always easy but using these steps you should be able to find a safe and reliable proxy site in no time. Happy surfing!