Are Web Proxy Servers Safe To Enter Passwords?
One of our readers dropped us a email asking us a very interesting question, the reader asks us that some of the sites he wants to access is blocked by his university, he can access the sites using a proxy server, however he wants to know whether entering password on the proxy site is safe?
First of all, there are 100s of web proxy servers available today, many of them spring up everyday and disappear as quickly as they came by, this definitely puts a big question mark on whether a proxy server is really safe and whether or not they are harvesting information you enter while using them, which in turn in a privacy and security concern.
That said there are several public web proxy servers which are verified and safe to browse with, however using proxy servers for banking and other important stuff is a big NO NO, don’t ever trust any other connection other than your own, when you are dealing with sensitive data.
A safer way of using proxy servers is using the Tor Project, which we had detailed in the article How to Browse Internet Anonymously?, the Tor Project has reliable proxy servers that are safe and are contributed by the users themselves, but again there is no guarantee whether someone is harvesting information through the proxy servers.
If you just want to browse the web without entering passwords you can do that safely, however use then only to browse and watch sites like YouTube, Flickr, etc. Here are few options to browse internet using proxy servers.
So to answer the big question, is it safe to use proxy servers to enter passwords? Our advise is do not do it, unless you don’t care about your security, using proxy servers for regular browsing may not cause any harm.
What are your views? Have you come across proxy servers that have harvested the information you have entered?
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Author: Keith Dsouza
I am the editor-in-chief and owner of Techie Buzz. I love coding and have contributed to several open source projects in the past. You can know more about me and my projects by visiting my Personal Website.I am also a social networking enthusiast and can be found active on twitter, you can follow Keith on twitter @keithdsouza. You can click on my name to visit my Google+ profile.Keith Dsouza has written 4449 articles for us.
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I totally agree that it is unsafe to use your username and passwords in conjunction with proxies.
Unless your interested in uploading your own proxy software to your own hosted server or webhost. I uploaded PHProxy to my webhost and I have my own proxy I use at work.
use of debit and credit cards on proxy servers is not recommended……….A BIG NO NO!!!please dont try it out for you will see a bank statement stating zero account balance!!!
and the question is: how anonymous is??? can i trust that no thirdparty server could trackk me???..
is it safe to use proxy servers ? i recently used http://www.iloveitproxy.com for facebook………it took my password and some surety verifications……but finally couldn't log in………. now i tensed about was that a fake site!!?!?!?!
Superficial article. Doesn’t give any information whether SSL web proxies are secure or not.