If you were to scrape data from a region-locked website and just found out about proxies, it’s certainly fair to assume that one of the first thoughts would be related to free proxies. After all, why would you pay for a service if there are ways to get it for free? However, upon reading and digging for more information, you’d quickly realize that free proxies bring a plethora of concerning issues. 

Are free proxies safe?

Free proxies allure with an image of simplicity. Find the location and website you’d like, and you’re done. Yet, like with most things, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Here are five reasons why you should avoid using free proxies:

1. The vast majority of free proxies don't use HTTPS

The HTTPS protocol ensures that your connection is encrypted; shockingly, nearly 80% of free proxy servers don’t allow for an HTTPS connection. In practical terms, this means that all data you’re sending can be easily monitored. As such, if data privacy is a concern in any way, then free proxies are a poor choice.

2. Your connection can be easily monitored

It’s theorized that one of the primary reasons why most free proxies don’t use HTTPS is because they wish to monitor you. After all, there have been numerous free proxies set up in the past for this exact reason.

Every time you use a free proxy, you’re essentially gambling and, at best, hoping that the owners won’t use or sell your data/information in any way, which is a worry you certainly don’t want to have.

3. Cookie stealing

It’s essential to protect your cookies since they’re used to store your login details. They exist to simplify the process of logging in (so you don’t have to repeat the login process every time) and, as such, store sensitive data. However, when a proxy server is established between you and a website, the said proxy owners can easily steal cookies as they’re being established. This would allow them to not only impersonate you online but also to login to the deeply sensitive websites you’ve visited.

4. The issue of malicious software

There is a common theme running within all the issues discussed on free proxies, and that's essentially hoping that access to your data will not be abused with no certain guarantees. The issue of malicious malware, for example, suffers from the same problems as, technically, nothing is stopping the proxy owners from infecting your hardware.

Interestingly, some of the malware could be added unintentionally, even without the owners knowing. Since free proxies often depend on ads for their revenue, they may, even without malicious intent, advertise dangerous malware-based ads.

5. Low quality service

Sadly after taking all the risks mentioned above, the reward is suboptimal. On average free proxies are, compared to paid ones, drastically slower, both due to the lack of funding and the number of people that may be using them simultaneously.

In short, all these factors combined make free proxies a high-risk, low-reward service.

What is a premium proxy?

Premium proxies are effectively the exact opposite of free proxies. They are fast, reliable, transparent, and completely safe.

Advantages of Advanced Agents

1. Safety

Most issues outlined within free proxies are related to safety. Premium proxies offer unparalleled protection, and they take the responsibility upon themselves to ensure your data is as safe as possible. The security of data is both a value-generating property and a factor that, if overlooked, could get a proxy provider into serious trouble.

2. Quality and speed

It’s probably unsurprising that paid proxy services offer significantly faster speeds. Yet, what is arguably as important as quickness is the uptime. Free proxies have no obligations to ensure that their connections are always available. Technically, premium proxies don’t as well, but when dealing with large businesses, speeds and an unending uptime are essential; therefore, you usually get both from top proxy providers. 

It should also be noted that within industry-leading proxy businesses, there is a lot of effort put into getting quality, ethical proxies. Such a fact is closely related to uptime and stability as it decreases the chance of various proxies disappearing without notice.

3. State of the art technology

Efficiency is vital for any large-scale project, and the same is for proxies. A sure way to provide the highest levels of it, especially in a field such as IT, is through technological developments, and the proxy/data gathering industry is full of them. By choosing a premium solution, you’ll often be introduced to various advancements like AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) that greatly increase proxies’ effectiveness, especially in fields like web scraping.

Conclusion

It’s abundantly clear that using free proxies brings a heap of serious, underlying issues. Sadly, due to the nature of these proxies, such problems will not go away. Yet, even after establishing the myriad of difficulties you could encounter while using free proxies, they still serve a role. On a small scale, using free proxies may not produce harm, though that is still somewhat of a gamble. It’s when projects start to scale up; that’s when free proxies go from a risky choice to a dangerous issue. 

Therefore, similarly to the theme discussed throughout this blog post, you must decide what your exact needs are and, based upon them, make the decision yourself. Even after choosing to pay for proxies, a provider has to be chosen with great care.