We’re not fans of proxy servers. But what is a proxy server?

Recently, we’ve spilled a lot of digital ink explaining why free proxy servers in particular are a bad idea. If you’re looking to mask your web traffic to maintain your privacy and anonymity online, you’re way better off checking out a VPN.

In case you missed it: since a free proxy server doesn’t encrypt your web traffic, it’s like a plank of plywood laid over a massive security pothole. Aside from leaving you completely visible to third parties, free proxies slow down your connection, and often fail to bypass geoblocks.

Worst of all, many of them are maintained by shady individuals who can add whatever malware they want onto your traffic. That’s why Tor, one of the best-known free proxy networks, is blanket-blocked by most upstanding websites.

So… Are Premium Proxies Better?

After reading all this, many of you might have reached the conclusion that proxies must be better if you pay for them.

That’s a reasonable line of thinking. Premium products have to be better, or nobody will pay. And if they make money from their customers, they don’t have any incentive to steal your data or turn your computer into an adbot.

Or so you might think. The awful truth about premium proxies is: they’re not for you.

Businesses don’t put together extensive lists of premium proxy servers so they can sell them to the public. They sell them to other businesses.

You read that right. Premium proxies have far more to do with corporate espionage than they do with keeping you safe online. While many people still think they’re a security product, premium proxies are most often used to bypass firewalls.

Today, we’re going to tell you the whole truth. Welcome to the unauthorized biography of premium proxies.

What Is a Proxy Server?

The internet is an enormous collection of digital devices that are all capable of talking to each other. Anything visible to one device can theoretically be seen by all of them.

If you just said, “Wait, that’s a massive privacy risk!” then congratulations — you’re smarter than three-quarters of the people online right now.

The entities with the best view of everyone’s web traffic are internet service providers (ISPs), the ones allowing people to get online in the first place. It’s as though to buy anything, you have to tell the whole grocery store, no matter how embarrassing it is.

When we talk about seeing what “you” do online, what we’re really describing is your IP address, a unique fingerprint that identifies the device you’re surfing the web on. If third parties like your ISP can’t see your IP address, you’re effectively invisible.

That’s the theory, anyway. Specifically, that’s the theory proxy servers run on.

A proxy server is an extra stop your internet connection makes before reaching the servers belonging to your ISP, and from there it continues to Google or wherever else you’re going. If anyone traces the connection back, they’ll see the proxy server’s IP address, not yours.

Sounds great, right? Not really. The spanner in the works is a little thing called encryption.

What Is Encryption?

Encryption sounds like a cool thing that secret agents do. And it is. But it’s also a basic safety precaution that can mean the difference between a secure connection and an open wound.

At its most basic level, encryption is the process of converting data into what’s apparently gibberish, then converting the gibberish back into data once it reaches the intended recipient.

Imagine you write out a message, convert every letter into a corresponding number, and pass it to your friend. Separately, you pass them a list of the numbers that represent each of the letters. Using that key, your friend decodes the message.

Boom: encryption. As long as you and your friend are the only ones with the key, nobody will be able to read your secret messages.

The exact same thing happens online (though the encryption algorithms are a lot more complicated). When you submit a search through Google, your search is encrypted immediately, then decrypted once it reaches Google’s servers. If anybody tries to peek at your search in between, they’ll just see meaningless characters.

Here’s the catch: Google has the key. They can see what you search for, sell that data to advertisers, or leave it in the open for hackers to find.

Your ISP can see you as well. They can’t read your search queries, but they can see what domains you go to. However, if you had a way to encrypt all your browsing requests before you even reached your ISP’s server, then nobody would be able to trace them — not your ISP, not Google, and probably not even the NSA.

Guess what gives you that pre-connection encryption? A VPN.

Guess what does not? A proxy server — no matter how premium.

Without encryption, it doesn’t take a lot of work to trace your proxy server back to your actual server, breaking through your last layer of security.

Premium Proxies vs Free Proxies

In the interest of being thorough: yes, for the individual user, there are some non-trivial differences between premium proxies and free proxies.

Basically anybody who owns a server can turn it into a free proxy and slap it online for others to use. There’s no certification required.

A free proxy server could be run by a reputable service, like those offered by HideMyAss and Hide.me. Those companies, at least, own all their own servers. But other free proxy networks are run by volunteers, like the nodes on Tor. They could be poorly maintained, or even riddled with malware — there’s no way to tell.

Because premium proxy servers charge money, they’re held to higher standards. With a premium proxy, you can probably be confident that you’re not running your DNS requests through some Slovakian virus basement.

Note that we said “probably.” There’s still a possibility that a premium proxy could infect you. You just have a much better chance of success.

Yet if you look for premium proxies online, you’ll find articles extolling the best premium proxy services. Names like Smartproxy, Lime Proxies and Oxylabs will come up often. Plenty of proxies get good reviews and seem perfectly trustworthy.

The curious thing, though, is that they’re always referred to as “residential proxy services” or something similar. Which begs the question: why does being residential matter?

Who Uses Premium Proxy Servers?

Premium proxy servers are integral to a business practice called web scraping.

Web scraping isn’t just for businesses. At heart, scraping is the act of gathering data from a website faster than a human could do it by reading through and taking notes. Scraper programs go through a web page, extract all the useful values, then present them in a readable form such as a spreadsheet.

The business applications of web scraping are endless. Bloggers scrape the top Google search results to see which keywords are doing best. E-commerce retailers scrape their competitors’ websites to find out what they’re charging. Stockbrokers scrape data to predict the future of the market.

You’ve probably done it, too. If you’ve ever used one of those apps that skips the boring eight-page story on a recipe blog, you too know what it is to scrape.

However, businesses run into obstacles when scraping on a large scale. No business wants another business scraping their website. Not only does it give their competitors a data advantage, but too many scrapers operating at once can slow down a website for its human visitors.

Many corporations issue blanket bans on all IP addresses associated with other corporations. If you’re getting online from Walmart corporate headquarters, there’s a good chance you won’t be able to see Amazon.com at all.

How could Walmart get around this? As with so much of the internet, the answer is lying.

How Residential Proxies Work

Premium proxy services like Oxylabs and Smartproxy sell residential proxies — IP addresses associated with private homes, rather than corporate centers. The owners of these IP addresses consent to let the proxy service use their device when it’s idle. It’s one of several ways to get paid for your computer’s unused processing power.

In plain English: you shut off your laptop at bedtime and plug it in to charge up overnight. After you go to sleep, some corporate rando jumps on and pretends to be you, so he can undercut what Target.com is charging for tube socks.

Premium proxy brokers usually offer more than just residential IPs. You can also get a datacenter IP, a cheaper option for penetrating less-sophisticated security, or a mobile IP —  the rarest and most powerful proxy choice.

And yeah, the entire thing is shady as hell, especially if it’s a large corporation punching below its weight class. It strikes us as an online version of that episode of The Office where Michael and Dwight destroy a small family business for no good reason.

Let’s Talk Security, Again

Furthermore, you’ll notice there’s one thing we haven’t mentioned at all in this entire section: security for the proxy user.

Simply put, a premium residential proxy IP address has nothing to do with security, except when it comes to bypassing other people’s. With no encryption, it’s not too hard for a webmaster to follow one thread back to its source and find out who’s scraping their data.

But the webmaster can’t do anything with that information. The proxy network is totally decentralized — to block it, they’d have to block everybody. All they can do is contact the data scraper and politely ask them to stop.

Are There Any Good Premium Proxies?

Absolutely. They’re called VPNs.

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a network of encrypted proxy servers that can only be accessed by subscribers. Instead of buying processing power from privately owned servers, a reputable VPN company owns all its own servers.

And yeah, there are some disreputable ones. We once reviewed one that gave a fake address for its corporate headquarters. Outside of those, though, even the weakest VPN will serve you better than a premium proxy server.

Why VPNs Are Better

The biggest reason is that drum we keep banging: encryption. Your requests are encrypted before they leave your device, so neither your search engine nor your browser nor your ISP can violate your privacy.

There’s still one third party that can: the company operating the VPN. However, the best-reviewed VPN services (like ExpressVPN, NordVPN and Surfshark) are used by millions, so they’re under continuous scrutiny.

If one of them was making improper use of customer data, it would be a major story. If you use a well-reviewed VPN service, keep an eye on the news, but otherwise, trust that their privacy policies tell the truth.

Most VPNs try to place servers in as many parts of the world as possible, in order to cater to the widest range of potential customers. They also focus on maintaining as much connection speed as possible, and on building friendly UIs, so they can serve people other than the dorks who write about online security for a living.

Most of them cost money — hence the term “premium”  — but several, such as Windscribe, TunnelBear and Hide.me, offer free plans.

The existence of reliable free VPNs demolishes the last argument for an individual to use a premium proxy. You could pay a rock-bottom price of $2.50 per month for a premium proxy, and come out less secure than someone who paid $0 per month for a VPN.

Conclusion

Our goal in this article isn’t to make you feel stupid for considering a premium proxy server. It’s an easy mistake to make. Many powerful people have a monetary interest in the public misunderstanding their online security.

We’re not mad at the customers who use proxy servers instead of VPNs. We’re mad at the proxy providers for promoting their service as a complete security solution, and at the data-scraping companies who use them to take advantage of security loopholes.

VPNs aren’t perfect, either. But they’re one of the few security options that’s both trustworthy (sorry, Tor) and on the little guy’s side.

If you’ve used premium proxies for any reason, or if you’ve ever sold your processing power to a proxy company, we’d love to hear your story in the comments.

We like to think of personal cybersecurity as something a little like the video game Minecraft.

If you’ve had a child or been a child in the last 10 years, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered Minecraft. The player wakes up alone in a vast wilderness and must gather materials to build an impenetrable fortress.

Minecraft is a digitization of the idea every child has when they’re left alone to play outside: let’s build a fort! Tree forts, blanket forts, snow forts, Fortnite — they all come from the same instinct.

But what does this have to do with personal cybersecurity?

Keeping your personal data safe on the internet is often framed as a matter of dire need. If you don’t do everything exactly right, the hackers will get you. Although it’s true that leaving yourself unprotected is a huge risk, we think personal cybersecurity should be fun as well. You’re not hiding in the dark from monsters — you’re building yourself an internet fort.

Ready to create a cyber-castle that will stand the test of time? Read on.

What Is Personal Cybersecurity?

Personal cybersecurity means taking responsibility for the safety of yourself, your loved ones and your property when using the internet.

Going online is kind of like going abroad. When traveling, you’re more vulnerable than you are at home. In your home country, you’re aware of the local customs and you know where to look for danger. In distant lands, where you’re obviously a foreigner, you’re a more likely target for scammers and pickpockets.

You can’t rely on the police, since they only show up after the crime. They can only do so much to get your wallet back, so you take your own precautions. You wear your backpack on the front, you don’t flash wads of cash, you don’t accept services from suspicious people.

Personal cybersecurity is exactly the same, but online. It’s the sum total of actions you take to protect yourself — the walls of the online fort you build around yourself.

Why Is Cybersecurity Important?

Why is it important? Because your personal data is extremely valuable.

Hackers want it so they can sell it to advertisers, or force you to buy it back from them.  Advertisers want it so they can use it to sell things to you. Some governments want to use it to violate your rights to privacy and free speech.

It’s not that everyone is a target every minute they’re online; it’s that everyone can be a target. A hacker doesn’t care that you don’t think your identity is worth stealing — they’ll loot first and ask questions later.

But as you’ll see in the next section, the precautions you can take against them are incredibly easy.

On one side of the scale, you’ve got a few minutes of work. On the other, you’ve got the potential destruction of your finances and shameful ruining of your private life. The trade-off is clear: pay attention to personal cybersecurity.

13 Ways to Protect Your Personal Information Online

1. Remember you’re a target

Some of you probably read what we wrote above — the thing about how everyone can be a target — and assumed that “everyone” didn’t include you. This first tip is for you.

Here are a few things that do not deter information pirates in any way:

• Using a Mac
• Using Linux
• Using a mobile device
• Being young
• Being old
• Being smart
• Having watched a documentary about hackers once

Here are a few things that do deter information pirates:

• Never connecting your computer to the internet
• Taking up baking, as your hands will be too covered in flour to go online
• Being a cat, as they cannot use the internet

Nobody wakes up in the morning expecting to be the victim of a ransomware attack. Not even people who really should, like members of the U.S. government. That’s the environment hackers thrive in.

The best thing you can do for your personal cybersecurity is to accept that nobody’s coming to your rescue: not your parents, not your kids, not the ghost of Steve Jobs.

2. Let’s (not) go phishing

Hacking seems like complicated technical wizardry, and some of it is. But the most common online scams are just good old-fashioned grifting with a 21st-century coat of paint.

Take phishing. In a phishing scam, the con artist gets the victim to give up sensitive information by pretending to be somebody trustworthy, using the anonymity of the internet as cover.

Scammers send emails or private messages posing as a relative, friend or service professional. These messages will either ask you to share your information for a seemingly innocuous reason, or will convince you to click on a link (see #5) that will install a pernicious program on your computer.

To keep yourself safe from phishing attacks, cultivate skepticism. If your best friend sends you a Facebook message with a link in it, call them and ask if they actually sent the message. If you get an email from your bank asking for your account number, Google the text of the email: it’s likely to be a known scam others have reported.

It’s easy to spot scams once you start looking. If anything sets off alarm bells — weird phrasing, spelling mistakes — throw that email right in the spam folder.

3. Update your software and whack those moles

The companies that build reputable software have whole teams whose only job is to constantly stay ahead of security threats. When they discover a hole in their security, they release an update to fix it. It’s a never-ending game of Whac-A-Mole, and software updates are your rubber mallet.

You might think that software like Microsoft Word isn’t vulnerable because it doesn’t go online. But everything is connected to the internet these days. When all else fails, remember tip #1: you aren’t safe just because you think you’re safe.

4. Make your passwords more than passable

To paraphrase the prescient comedy film Spaceballs: “12345? That’s the kind of password an idiot would have on his luggage!”

Another way hackers can penetrate your systems without knowing a line of code is to guess your passwords. They use programs to rapidly try the most common passwords — “password,” “qwerty,” “abc123,” etc. If they guess one correctly, they’ll try it on all your other accounts, so woe betide you if you use the same password for everything.

The worst thing they can do is guess your email password. If they have that, they can use it to reset all your other passwords, locking you out of your entire online life.

But who can remember 50 different passwords that all have to have a capital letter, a number and a special character?

The good news is, you don’t have to. Password manager apps let you store all your passwords in an impenetrable encrypted vault. Then all you have to remember is the password to get into the vault. They can even fill the passwords in for you.

5. Think twice about links

Some links are fine. They hold chains together. They’re delicious for breakfast. They rescue Princess Zelda. Some even take you to fun places on the internet.

Others provide a doorway for malware to sneak onto your computer. Malware is like a data parasite, snagging your passwords and personal data while you browse unaware.

Hackers know they’ll never get you to download a malware app on purpose, so they’ll trick you into clicking a seemingly innocuous link — usually via a phishing scam (see #2). If you aren’t on a secure site (where a padlock appears in the URL bar), don’t click on any link, ever. Be even more on guard with emails, since automated spam filters can’t catch everything.

6. Imagine your sensitive data is a delicious sandwich

Pop quiz: what would be the worst thing a hacker could find out about you? Your bank account number? Your social security number? Your credit card number?

Once you have an answer, close your eyes and imagine that piece of information is your favorite kind of sandwich. Now answer one more question: would you leave that sandwich unattended in public?

Your online precautions should increase in proportion with the sensitivity of the data you’re dealing with. Never put any of your most sensitive data in a place where it will be saved unencrypted: in an email, on social media, in a Google search or anywhere on public WiFi (see #12).

7. Lock your mobile device

Lots of neighborhoods like to boast that you don’t have to lock your door. It’s nice, right up until someone gets robbed.

In the same way, nobody likes to unlock and relock their phone every time they use it. But if your phone ever gets stolen, you’re going to wish it was locked and that you weren’t offering up an information smorgasbord to the pickpocket.

8. Vaccinate your computer with antivirus software

We’ve been ignoring the news all year to avoid Bridgerton spoilers, so we’re not sure why everyone is so obsessed with vaccines lately. But it seems like a good time to reiterate the importance of antivirus software.

Installing an antivirus on your computer protects you with an app that knows all the tricks. A good antivirus has a list of millions of potential exploits. Whenever it detects malware sneaking in, it intercepts the attack and warns you.

Lest you think antivirus software is just fighting the last war, modern programs have incorporated artificial intelligence, anticipating new attacks before they happen.

9. Backup your data so often that people start to think it’s weird

There are some things it’s almost impossible to do too many times. Drinking a glass of water. Stretching. Throwing a ball for your dog. Backing up your personal data.

The hot new trend in hacking is ransomware. Hackers steal your files and make you pay to get your own stuff back. But if you’ve got recent copies of the files, you can thumb your nose at them. It’s like you got your car stolen, but you had a second, identical car hidden under a tarp.

Choose software that will back your hard drive up regularly, saving the data in the cloud. You won’t even have to think about it.

10. Learn the two-factor authentication waltz

Two-factor authentication is a fancy word for a simple idea: when logging into any account, you have to go a bit further to prove that you’re you.

This most often takes the form of a verification code sent to your mobile device, which you have to enter to finish logging in. It’s relatively easy for a hacker to get a hold of your username and password; it’s way harder for them to also steal your phone in the process.

You can enable two-factor authentication on most websites and apps by going to the security settings for your account.

11. Be antisocial on social media

By now, most of us know not to make our Facebook posts publicly searchable. Some people have graduated to the “friends of friends” setting, but think about that for a moment: if you have 500 friends and they each have 500 friends, that’s as many as 250,000 people, only a small fraction of whom you can trust.

Then there’s Twitter, where everything is public, even to people who don’t follow you. Instagram is an open wound unless your account is completely private. Reddit offers only a thin veneer of anonymity. Etcetera.

Social media is like hacker Christmas. Believing they’re among friends, people are far less guarded with their information. The only way to stay safe is to forgo using social media for its intended purpose of connecting with like-minded strangers.

12. Public WiFi is the devil

You are Eve in the Garden of Online, being tempted to eat the fruit of the Tree of Convenience.

Most public WiFi networks don’t encrypt the data that passes through them — even if they’re password-protected. A hacker can sit in the corner of the coffee shop, running a passive program to look through all the data being transmitted. If they see something that looks like a bank account login, it’s game over.

Your best bet is to do nothing on public WiFi that requires a login. You can run Google searches, read things, stream music or videos, but anything more sensitive is out.

13. Beware of apps bearing gifts

A “trojan” is a cool internet thing that got its name from this funny, ancient Greek story where thousands of people died. Listening now? Good.

In online security, a “trojan” is anything evil that sneaks onto your system by riding on something that looks safe. Phishing attacks could be considered trojans, but another common form is the seemingly convenient app.

Every time you download something onto your system, you’re opening yourself up to malware. Apps with thousands of reviews are probably fine, though keep an eye on the news just in case. Apps with only a few reviews, none of which are in English? Run the other way.

Even perfectly legitimate apps can hide shady clauses deep in the fine print, letting them steal your personal data and sell it to advertisers. If you take the time to read user agreements, you’ll protect yourself from both hackers and “legitimate” interlopers.

Conclusion

A lot of these articles end with “but don’t be scared all the time!” Since we just spent thousands of words listing things to be scared of, we get how this could ring a bit hollow. But we keep saying it because it’s true.

In fact, taking charge of your personal cybersecurity means you don’t have to be scared. You’re no longer a passive victim. Childhood forts aren’t just about keeping out the outside world —  they’re also about how awesome it is to have a space where you can feel safe.

So enjoy your newly safe internet experience — and if you have a favorite tip we missed, sound off in the comments!

You have many options for protecting your privacy and anonymity on the internet. A web proxy server is unquestionably one of them.

Look, we’re not going to pretend we think proxies are a good idea. Yes, running your web traffic through an anonymous proxy server masks your IP address and physical location, but that’s all it does.

Data routed through an anonymous proxy is not encrypted. If you send anything sensitive through a proxy, it’s out in the open for everyone to see, including the owner of the proxy. It’s a lot like the Monty Python sketch where the guy hides from a sniper behind the only bush in a wide-open field.

AllAnonymity has never wavered in our conviction that a VPN is the best way to stay secure online. But we don’t know your life. You might have a personal reason to prefer a proxy server.

Maybe you need an extremely cheap security solution. Maybe you don’t need to do anything riskier than watching regionally blocked content. Maybe you failed to pay a witch for a potion and she put a curse on you so that you could never use a VPN.

Or maybe you’re a business that needs to access websites to gather user data, but those websites block any business IP address.

Admittedly, that’s the least likely reason you’re here (maybe second-least), but it’s the number-one reason you’ll ever see a web proxy service offered without an attached VPN.

Whether you’re considering using a proxy server, or worried about other people using a proxy server against you, here are five things you need to know about these second-fiddle security solutions.

1. The Best Proxy Server Respects Your Privacy

As mentioned above, proxy servers aren’t encrypted. The administrator of the server can see all your traffic and where it came from (i.e. you). That means the most important trait in a proxy server is being trustworthy. Never give any web proxy the time of day, free or paid, unless it has a spotless record of keeping its users’ secrets.

Beyond that, look for proxies with consistent uptime. There’s nothing worse than getting comfy for your favorite Britcom, only to find out that your UK server isn’t responding.

Other perks to look for include a friendly user interface, easy download, a robust list of spoofable locations and multiple protocols (having more protocols makes a web proxy useful in a wider range of situations).

Finally, check to see if the proxy will slow down your internet connection by running a speed test while connected to one of its servers (use the free trial, if they offer one).

2. VPN vs Proxy: VPN Wins Every Time

It can be hard to tell these two security measures apart, as they’re often mentioned in the same breath. Both a proxy and a VPN service offer anonymous browsing on the internet by hiding your IP address.

When you use a proxy or VPN, whenever you request access to a website, it appears to be coming from another location. This hides your activities from advertisers, hackers and overreaching governments. It’s like getting off at a different bus stop so the creepy guy in the back (we’ll call him Dave) doesn’t find out where you live.

But what if Creepy Dave gets off the bus with you and follows you all the way to your street, trying to get you to invest in his MLM? You’re going to want another layer of security. That’s what a VPN offers.

An anonymous proxy launders your connection through third-party IP addresses, but other than that, it’s the exact same internet you’re using unprotected. In contrast, a VPN connects you to its servers using an encrypted tunnel that can’t be traced from the outside (hence why some people refer to a VPN connection as “tunneling”).

Imagine you’re throwing down smoke bombs every few yards as you flee from Creepy Dave, ninja style. It doesn’t help him to know where you started, because now he can’t see where you’re going or what you’re doing.

So, is there any reason to choose a proxy over a VPN service provider? Not really. That said, we’ll be judging the best proxy servers against the other proxies out there, not against VPN services. Just remember as you read that we don’t believe any of these hold a candle to an average VPN service.

3. Businesses Use Proxy Servers to Gather Data on You

Most of the time you stumble on a reputable, well-reviewed proxy service, it’s not marketed to you at all. One glance at the pricing makes that clear. Oxylabs proxy servers start at $180 per month, and that’s the reasonable option.

The real customers for these proxy networks? Businesses.

Nowadays, reliable market research requires so much data that simply gathering it is a full-time job. The easiest way to get that data is for a business to use a scraper: a program you can let loose on a website to gather all data of a certain type. For example, a company could deploy an army of Twitter scrapers to report on users who mentioned keywords related to their products.

But there’s a catch. Knowing that businesses use scrapers to do competitor research, many websites block any IP address associated with a business.

So how is a company supposed to get that sweet, sweet data? Obviously, by donning an impenetrable disguise.

By rerouting data through proxy IPs that seem to belong to private residences, researchers can slip their data scrapers through the dragnet, Trojan-horse style.

Proxy servers offered by companies like Oxylabs and Luminati offer several subscription tiers. You can send your data crawler traffic through a random datacenter, which is cheaper, but might get you caught. For a bit more money, a crawler can gather data with its very own residential IP address, just like a human.

If a certain user is doing nothing but browsing pages, it’s often hard to tell whether they’re a human or a bot. That’s why most websites catch bots by restricting certain IPs, rather than trying to search and destroy them one by one. Scrapers don’t need the extra protection of a VPN because they’re not sharing any suspicious information.

Individual users, on the other hand, really should seek out that additional security. Knowing that this sort of skulduggery is out there makes it all the more important to take common-sense steps to protect yourself.

4. Free Proxy Servers Are Safe to Use (at Least Some of Them)

Unlike large-scale paid proxy networks, the best free proxy servers are intended for use by Joe and Jane Q. Internet. They provide a basic privacy solution with a few different use cases:

• You can get around a content ban at a school or workplace.
• You can access region-locked content from another country, or from your home country while traveling abroad.
• You can enjoy a basic, though far from Dave-proof, level of security.

All that said, you might be suspicious about routing your internet traffic through a free proxy server, and you’d be right. The owner of the proxy can mess with you in all sorts of ways. It’s the reason so many websites block Tor connections — the nodes of the famous “onion router” are maintained by volunteers with no background checks whatsoever.

When the proxy is free, it’s quadruply important to make sure it has a good reputation. Here are a few we can vouch for.

HideMyAss 

It says a lot that our favorite free proxy is an ad for a VPN. HideMyAss offers a simple proxy you can use in your browser without having to download or install anything. Just paste the URL into the bar, choose what national server you want to spoof, and get started.

Be warned that while HMA has the best free proxy servers of the lot, the VPN is merely adequate. It’s got a massive server network but a somewhat shady privacy policy. You’ll be better off with one of the VPN choices in Section 5.

Hidester

Hidester is another copy-and-paste, in-browser, free proxy that simplifies things even further by giving you two server choices: United States and Europe. Like HideMyAss, Hidester is paste and go. Most websites you visit will slow way down, but if you absolutely have to get around a content blocker, Hidester is a quick-and-dirty solution.

Hide.me 

This free proxy from VPN company Hide.me works a lot like the others: enter a URL, choose a server and go. It’s noteworthy, though, because it is piggybacking off a VPN that also offers a strong free plan. While it doesn’t top any of our lists, we give Hide.me credit for consistently putting security ahead of profit.

5. Have We Mentioned You Should Use a VPN? Here Are the 5 Best VPNs

In case we haven’t been obvious enough about it, a VPN offers better security than a proxy in every situation. Unless your school or office network literally prevents you from downloading anything, you should use a VPN.

The cynical among you (and you should be cynical — this is the internet) might now be suspicious that we’re shilling for a particular VPN company. And while we do have a favorite, we’d like to use this section to highlight the wide range of high-quality VPNs on the market.

1. ExpressVPN

ExpressVPN hits all the high notes: it’s lightning-fast, great for streaming, tightly encrypted with AES-256 security and offers a forgiving 30-day free trial. However, its plans are quite pricey, but the VPN is worth it if you can afford it.

2. NordVPN

NordVPN is one of the most secure VPN options out there, especially with its Double-hop servers. It’s also great for torrenting, has an easy-to-use kill switch and boasts the best value over multi-year plans.

3. CyberGhost 

CyberGhost suffers slower speeds when using the most secure OpenVPN protocol, but improves significantly on the slightly shakier IKEv2. This makes it perfect for low-risk situations — and it’s also cheap. In other words, it’s a proxy killer.

4. Private Internet Access (PIA) 

Hands down the best value you’ll find for a VPN, PIA has way more features than you’d expect on such a cheap service, but also nails the fundamentals (security and speed).

5. Windscribe

Windscribe’s free version handles 10GB of traffic per month, and comes with all the features. If your app budget is stretched too thin to pay anything at all, Windscribe won’t let you down.

Final Thoughts on Proxies

To conclude, we’d like to pull back just a little on the heated rhetoric. To tell the truth, we don’t believe that ALL VPNs are superior to ALL proxies.

Consider the case of IPVanish, a VPN that was found in 2016 to keep logs of user activity despite pinky-swearing not to. A VPN that spies on your personal activity and saves records of it is about the purest example there is of a fox guarding the hen house. It actively makes you less secure.

But even in that case, proxies aren’t the solution. Stick with VPNs until you find one that works. There are free plans that will give you what you need. There are affordable paid plans that do basically everything. As long as you explore, you’re sure to find what you need.

Thanks for reading! If you have a favorite VPN we didn’t mention — or if you know the one web proxy server that will redeem the whole species — we’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

Anonymity is about freedom. Privacy is about control. Confidentiality is about trust.

These three words are not synonyms, and the difference between them is bigger than just hairsplitting. Understanding online privacy vs anonymity, and knowing that confidentiality isn’t the same as either, are vital steps toward protecting your rights to all three.

The people working against you don’t want you to understand these things. If somebody promises you anonymity when you’re looking for privacy, they have an advantage over you. However, once you know the definition of anonymity, privacy and confidentiality, you’ll be able to choose the right tools to protect yourself.

How Does Privacy Differ From Anonymity Online?

Pretty much everyone knows about Batman.

If you don’t, text the nerdiest person you know and ask them to explain it to you. Chances are, they’ll say something like this: Bruce Wayne is a billionaire playboy who fights crime disguised as a giant bat.

You may have gotten some other details — he’s an orphan, he hates clowns, his butler does all the real work — but for this article, we’re most concerned with Batman’s relationship to privacy and anonymity.

Bruce Wayne lives in an enormous mansion. When he’s in his home, he can do whatever he likes (within reason). Nobody will know about his interest in bats unless he chooses to let them in. Bruce enjoys the same right as every other American: the right to privacy.

We can’t overlook, though, that the Waynes are the most famous family in Gotham City. The mansion is literally named after them. Nobody could walk past Wayne Manor and think “Huh. I wonder who lives there.”

Now, let’s say Bruce suits up, has Alfred gas up the Batmobile, and heads out into the night. He interrupts a bank robbery in progress and beats up the criminals, who never know they’ve just been punched by Bruce Wayne.

Hidden in plain sight as Batman, Bruce Wayne enjoys anonymity. When Commissioner Gordon asks who caught the bank robbers, he’ll know it was Batman right away, but he won’t know who’s behind the mask. Batman’s actions aren’t hidden; in public, on the street, he has no privacy.

It’s the same with everybody who goes around protected by a mask, costume or pseudonym. The Lone Ranger. Banksy. Borat. Everyone on The Masked Singer. Every user of Reddit, most of Tumblr and much of Twitter.

When you’re private but not anonymous, you’re in your own personal Wayne Manor. People know who you are, but not what you’re doing. When you’re anonymous but not private, people know the actions but not who is doing them.

If I read your diary, I’d be violating your privacy. If I doxed you (shared your address or phone number with hostile parties), I’d be violating your anonymity — just as surely as if I’d pulled off Batman’s mask.

Get the picture?

What Is Online Privacy?

In the previous section, we defined privacy like this: you may be identifiable, but personal information about you is not.

Another way to think of it: you have total control over all data that concerns you. For anybody to see any of that data, you have to give your consent first.

It’s crucial to understand that this decision need not be based on anything other than your preference. You don’t have to explain why you’re keeping your personal information private. Your desire is enough.

In the United States, the right to privacy is guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which states: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”

Yet there are exceptions and conditions on each of our rights to keep things private. The Fourth Amendment itself provides for search warrants. Your tax return is not private, because you don’t have control over when you file it. And so on.

It’s also common for these exceptions to be transactional: if I don’t give up certain pieces of information, I can’t get things I want in return. If I go to a coffee shop without any cash and refuse to hand over the financial information from my debit card, I can’t have any coffee.

The internet frequently works the same way. It’s impossible to use most services without creating an account. Even if you sign up with a false name and a burner email address, that false name becomes an identity that begins to attract data.

But there’s good news. Online privacy can be preserved by means of encryption.

Suppose you’re signing up for a messenger service. You have to give them your name and phone number to use the app, so they can always identify who you are when you’re online.

However, this is a trustworthy service, so they offer end-to-end encryption of all data. When a message is sent, it’s instantly scrambled into nigh-unbreakable code, only to be decrypted once it reaches its recipient.

“End-to-end” means the encryption also applies to the app company — they’ll only be able to see your messages as encrypted data.

Cloud storage services are another common example of encryption-based privacy. When you sign up for a cloud service like Dropbox, you’re voluntarily placing your private data on somebody else’s server. To counter that risk, Dropbox encrypts every file saved on their network, so that only the user is able to read them.

What Is Online Anonymity?

At the start of this article, we described anonymity as the ability to do anything without anybody knowing it’s you doing it. The action is seen clearly, but not the instigator.

While privacy is being behind the closed door of your room, anonymity is being one stranger on a street full of other strangers. Online, however, it’s a little stronger than that.

When writing a blog or posting on a forum, you want your message to be seen — if it’s private, it can’t be read. With anonymity, you can make your voice heard without suffering the consequences of your words.

Granted, this can go badly. Some people use online anonymity to engage in hate speech they wouldn’t dare spew out in person. But criticism is the foundation of a free society. Anonymity helps make citizens of a democracy comfortable with critiquing their government, and for that alone, I think it’s worthwhile.

What Is Pseudonymity?

The most common form of online anonymity is the use of a handle. On Twitter, Reddit and other social sites, everyone goes by false names. You can use a photo that doesn’t look like you, act totally different than you would in real life, and delete your profile and start over whenever you want.

This is called pseudonymity. It’s any community where your actions are ascribed to a consistent identity which isn’t associated with your real one.

In our superhero example, Batman has enough of a reputation that people know him by sight, but the actions can’t be traced back to Bruce Wayne. The pseudonym itself becomes the identity.

Spoiler alert, though: few pseudonym-based communities are actually anonymous, since it’s easy to trace a person’s social media activity through their IP address — or sometimes even basic detective work.

What Is Online Confidentiality?

Sometimes you can’t maintain total data privacy. Imagine an appointment with your doctor where everything you said to them was encrypted. Your medical records would stay totally private, but it would be useless for getting that strange growth looked at.

That’s when our third concept comes into play: confidentiality.

Confidentiality is when you tell someone something in confidence. You choose to release some of your private information to another entity, with the understanding that it won’t be shared outside that relationship. For example, Bruce Wayne trusts his butler, Alfred, to keep his Batman secret confidential.

Essentially, confidentiality is privacy with benefits. Your private information is still controlled, only this time, it’s by a shared confidentiality agreement instead of just your preferences.

Medical information, things discussed in therapy, sensitive job details and religious confessions are protected by confidentiality. So, theoretically, are your internet activities — confidential between you and your internet service provider, or you and your search engine.

Why theoretically?

Sadly, it’s because most ISPs and search engines value their profits over your rights. They take information that should be confidential and bury clauses in their user agreements that allow them to sell your activity to advertisers.

Scroll down to “How to Protect Your Privacy Online” to learn how you can stop them.

Which Is More Important: Anonymity vs Privacy?

Privacy and anonymity are both important. Which one is more important depends on what you’re trying to do on the internet.

Privacy is most important for financial transactions. When paying or receiving money on the internet, you need to be identified for the transfer to work. But if the info leaks, your identity can be stolen.

Anonymity is most important for messaging. To express an opinion, especially one your government might find dangerous, you want a guarantee that the content you produce won’t be traced back to you.

How to Protect Your Privacy Online

When you send a search query to Google, only two parties are supposed to know about it: you and Google. So how do third-party advertisers keep using private information to send you creepy ads?

Confidentiality requires enforcement. The law should protect you from ISPs and search engines breaking their confidentiality agreements, but internet utilities are not nearly as afraid of the law as they should be.

The result? To use most apps, you have to sign a user agreement first, which is almost certainly stuffed with fine print that lets them sell your data: search queries, browsing history and even your physical location.

You’ve technically given your consent, but only because nobody has 15 spare hours (or a lawyer on retainer) to read the whole thing. You’re also not given much of a choice — either agree to the terms or don’t use the service.

Here’s how to protect your privacy and anonymity so you can keep enjoying the internet the way you like — without your actions being used against you.

How to Stay Anonymous Online 

Our guide here goes into detail about anonymous web surfing, but in short, the best way is to use a VPN.

A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, gets you both privacy and anonymity. To make sure all your transactions are private, it encrypts your data so that none of your searches or transactions are visible to third parties.

To ensure anonymity, a VPN masks your website requests from your ISP by running them through proxy servers. If they try to track your activity to sell you targeted ads, all they can see is the general location of the VPN’s server. Your actions can’t be traced back to you: near-perfect anonymity.

Our favorite VPN is ExpressVPN, but NordVPN and CyberGhost are also strong players. If you don’t have the budget for a new app right now, Windscribe’s free service will do the trick.

Final Thoughts on Online Anonymity vs Privacy

I told you at the top that anonymity is about freedom, while privacy is about control. But in the end, they’re both about the same thing: the ability to determine which parts of you the world sees. That’s more than a constitutional right. It’s a human right.

If you’ve had experiences with anonymity, privacy or confidentiality, or you’ve got a favorite app for any of them that we didn’t mention, we’d love to hear from you in the comments. Thanks for reading.

The idea of a “tracking device” used to feel too sci-fi to be real.

Were we really supposed to believe there were tiny geotracking devices, hidden in someone’s clothes or possessions, that could tell you where they were at all times? It was like tracing calls, or “enhancing” photos: if it ever did happen, it was never anything like in the movies.

At least, that’s how it used to be…before tracking devices were available to everybody on the open market, and before all of us started willingly carrying them around in our pockets.

Creeped out? Even a little frightened? That’s only fair: geolocation tracking, aka geotracking, is a threat to everyone’s privacy.

But we don’t want to wallow in fear for long. Here at AllAnonymity, our mission is to give you the information you need to fight back against those who would invade your privacy.

In this article, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about geolocation tracking, and how you can keep the bad guys from spying on your physical whereabouts.

What Is Geolocation Tracking (or Geotracking)?

Broadly, geotracking refers to any technology that can locate an object in something like real time.

This generally works by means of triangulation. If you know the direction of one point from two other points, you can figure out that point’s exact location. If I’m due-north of one specific cell tower and due-east of another, there’s only one place on Earth I could be.

Cell towers are a common source of geographic location information, since your phone bounces a signal off them in order to work. They tend to use three towers instead of two for more accurate calculations. WiFi access ports and GPS satellites can be used for triangulation as well.

Geolocation tracking isn’t always sinister. Using your phone’s maps app to find an address, or using a tracking number to see whether your package has shipped, are both technically geotracking, but they don’t directly threaten anyone’s privacy. Businesses might use geolocation data to monitor their supply chains or to find property if it gets stolen.

However, in this article, I’ll be concerned with the uses of geolocation tracking that skew decidedly creepwards — and how you can defeat them.

What Kind of Data Does Geotracking Reveal?

In 2018, The New York Times spent four months tracking a volunteer using just the location data she unknowingly shared with her cellphone apps. The report was chilling.

The subject’s location data had been harvested by her apps in near real time — about every 20 minutes. Not only could the reporters tell exactly where she’d gone every day, they could also deduce how long she’d spent there, giving them clues about what she was doing.

The ability of your cellphone to use location data is often treated as a good thing: Adjust your driving route in real time! Find the best Thai food in your neighborhood! Meet hot singles in your area!

As is so often the case, this rosy view of the future fails to account for the danger of one entity having that much power. The biggest danger is that the entity collecting the geolocation information will sell it to someone else — the secondary market for location data was worth $10.6 billion in 2019, and it’s only going to grow.

Who Is Tracking You and Why?

It’s almost impossible to know how many companies, advertisers and less-scrupulous interlopers have crossed your geolocation privacy boundaries without your consent. Even worse, geotracking is legal (though some lawmakers are looking to change that).

Something else that’s surprisingly legal: buying tracking devices. Amazon has pages and pages of GPS trackers for sale. There’s nothing stopping anybody from buying one and sticking it on someone’s backpack, purse or vehicle without their consent.

So it’s not just evil corporations that might be pawing through your geolocation data. It could be your parents, your spouse, your ex, your stalker or even the police. In this section, we’ll run through everybody who might use location data to keep tabs on you — and how they do it.

1. Businesses: Data Is the New Oil

Businesses are aware that the average person hates to be advertised to. Sure, we love to consume products, but we want to come to them on our own terms.

That’s why corporate America is so hungry for geolocation data. If they know where a potential consumer is and how that place fits into the person’s daily routine, they can target ads to that person at the times when they’ll be most receptive. Cold drinks after the gym. Weight loss products after a dinner out. Self-help books after a visit to the therapist.

You can see how quickly this becomes a violation of your privacy — and it’s not just one violation. Businesses wage a constant, relentless assault on our right to a private life…and most of the time, it’s because we let them do it. Companies don’t need to place a tracking device on you. They get their data through apps and devices that you willingly use.

Let’s run through an example. Suppose you use Google Maps to find your way to that new bar you’ve been meaning to try. When you get home, you put your phone on the bedside table and go to sleep.

When Google sees that you’ve left your phone dormant in a certain location for several hours at night, they deduce that this means you live there. Knowing where you live lets them guess at your income, spoken language, family status, education level and more.

If your phone follows you to work every day, they know what your job is, too. With those two data points, it’s like they can triangulate a person. Next time you Google something, you see some scarily personalized ads — the result of a geolocation marketer making an educated guess. It only takes one night.

How did things get this bad?

People are watching much less broadcast TV than they used to. That deprives marketers of one of their biggest advertising channels. However, since more people than ever are carrying GPS devices in their pockets, geolocation advertising has stepped up to fill the void.

It’s nothing personal. It’s just business. Unfortunately, you’re the business.

2. Spouses: Can I Track My Wife’s Phone Without Her Knowing?

A single Google search for “spouse phone tracking” reveals a terrifying range of options for spying on the person you vowed to trust ’til death you did part.

Apps such as Spyic and Spyine can be installed on another person’s phone. They run in the background, consuming as little data and battery as possible so their presence stays concealed. If your target’s phone is connected to a cloud service (as most iOS phones are to iCloud), you can install a spy app on it without even touching their phone.

All you have to do is steal their cloud login credentials — which, frankly, should be the first sign that what you’re doing is wrong.

Phone tracking apps like Spyic are rich in features. Once installed on a target’s phone, a user can log into a web-based dashboard. From there, they can spy on the phone’s location data, see the address data of places they visit, check them out through Google Street View and view a log of the subject’s past movements.

Oh, and plenty of spy apps are capable of reading your text messages, call logs and browser history.

You’ll find these apps reviewed on dozens of websites. Many of them state, completely without irony, that you don’t have to worry about the app company stealing the data you are currently stealing from your spouse’s phone. Apparently, Spyic alone has over a million users, which is the sort of thing that makes you want to burn down the internet for the insurance money.

We’re not a relationship advice website, but come on. No matter how desperate things feel, invading your SO’s privacy isn’t the solution.

3. Parents: Tracking Apps for Kids

Do you want to ensure your children will never call you again the second they turn 18 and move out? There’s an app for that!

Apps such as Life360, mSpy and MamaBear can track your kids’ location data at all times and spy on their messages, guaranteeing years of icily silent family dinners and decades of ignored birthdays.

These apps work similarly to the ones that track spouses, with one key difference: parents can legally force their kids to download the spying app onto their own phones.

If you’re considering using one of these apps to track your child…don’t. For two reasons.

First, whatever you’re worried about — sexting, cyberbullying, unsafe driving — the solution is not technology. It’s a trusting relationship with your child. Yes, we’re aware that’s more difficult, but you’re the one who signed up for parenting.

Second, teens know more about technology than you do. They will figure out how to beat the app, and they’ll compare notes. The most likely thing they’ll do is start leaving their phone at home anytime they go anywhere, which is the exact opposite of the behavior you want to encourage.

4. Stalkers: Every Breath You Take

According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, about three-quarters of stalking victims know their stalkers. Two-thirds of female stalking victims reported that their stalker was a partner or ex-partner.

Anybody can place a GPS tracker on someone’s car. But if a stalker is using one of the newfangled tracking apps, it helps if they used to be close to their intended victim. The modern stalker can secretly download an app on their partner’s phone and still be able to find her exact location data months after they break up.

Yet another chilling thing about all this: these stalker apps find phones using GPS and cell tower triangulation, exactly the same way advertisers do.

5. Law Enforcement: Know Your Rights

When Google, Apple, Facebook and other tech giants collect data on you through their products, they don’t just sell it to other businesses. The U.S. government is also making bids.

Vice recently reported on a company called X-Mode that acts as a broker for geolocation data. X-Mode bought user location data from seemingly trustworthy apps — such as a carpenter’s level, a storm tracker, and an app that tells Muslims how to face Mecca at prayer time. X-Mode then sold that data to ICE and the U.S. Military.

If you’re wondering if this is constitutional, well, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled at least once that gathering GPS data without a warrant is a violation of the Fourth Amendment. And these apps gather location data indiscriminately — almost nobody they track has been charged with a crime, and you can forget about search warrants. But there are still a lot of edge cases for which there’s no precedent. 

A Note About the GPS Act

In 2017, lawmakers introduced the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act (GPS Act), which would make it illegal for private businesses to share geotracking information without the subject’s consent. Law enforcement and the government would have to show probable cause, similar to any other search warrant.

It isn’t perfect — for example, it explicitly exempts minors from protection. But it’s a good start.

The GPS Act is currently stuck in the Judiciary Committee. If you care about privacy in the digital age, consider contacting your U.S. senators and representatives and telling them you feel strongly about taking it up.

How to Keep Your Location Data Safe

Here are some quick steps you can take right now to stop your location data being tracked without your consent.

Protect Against Business and Advertising Surveillance

1. Turn off location tracking

On an iPhone, open your Settings panel, then go to Privacy > Location Services. You can turn off location services for all apps, or let a few (like your maps app) learn your location data only while you’re using them. If you choose to do this, make sure you close the app fully and don’t let it run in the background.

The latest Android versions forbid all apps from accessing location data by default. When you open an app that needs your location, such as Google Maps, the OS will ask to grant that app permission to track your location while it’s on.

On an Android phone, go to Settings > Biometrics and Security > App Permissions > Location to check that location data is still turned off for all apps, or set to “while using” at most.

2. Hide your phone ID from advertisers

Your phone is assigned an ID number that advertisers use to distinguish your activity. You can turn this off from within your phone’s settings.

On an iPhone, go to Settings > Privacy, and scroll down to Advertising. Click on it, then turn on “limit ad tracking” to hide your mobile identity from advertisers.

On Android, go to Settings > Google > Ads > Opt out of Ads Personalization to stop getting creepy targeted ads.

3. Disable tracking in your Google account

Even with the above settings turned off, Google tracks both Android and iPhone users from the web end. If your phone is synced with your desktop browser in any way, Google will sneak in through the back door.

To stop this, sign in to your Google account, then go to Personal Info & Privacy > Manage Your Activity Controls.

Scroll down to Location Activity and switch it off. If there’s any history of location data tracking in your account, delete it.

4. Browse anonymously on your phone

All the tips for browsing anonymously with a desktop browser also apply to using the internet on mobile. That means the most important thing you can do to keep your phone from being tracked is to use a VPN.

A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, is a way to mask a device’s identity while it’s connected to the world wide web. It runs in the background, constantly laundering your activity through anonymous servers so it can never be traced back to you.

Using a VPN is a vital step, because every other step on this list requires you to trust that companies who engage in geolocation tracking are telling you the truth. Don’t let Google be the only thing protecting your rights from Google.

The best VPNs — such as ExpressVPN, NordVPN and Surfshark — have dedicated mobile apps that are user-friendly and low impact.

Protect Against Intimate Partner Surveillance

1. Defend your phone

If you have any reason to believe your partner might start spying on you, never, ever let them borrow your phone. Don’t leave it alone anywhere they might find it, and change your access code.

Turn off the option to unlock your phone with a thumbprint ID — abusers can wait until you’re asleep, then use your thumb to open your phone. Somebody only needs 5 to 10 minutes alone with your phone to install whatever they want.

This might go without saying, but don’t give your partner your login credentials for any online accounts.

2. Know the signs

Most spying apps do their best to hide in the background, but there are still ways you can tell if you’ve been tagged with one.

Your phone itself will show signs of excessive background activity. Watch for a drop in battery life coupled with a rise in data usage; the app might even show up on the page that details your cellular data or battery use.

Other signs include the phone turning on by itself (because of activity in the background app), or you finding texts or emails you don’t remember sending. Listen for strange sounds during voice calls, especially a slight echo that suggests your voice is being recorded.

Often, the most telling signs come from your partner themselves. If they always seem to know where you are, or if they mention details you never told them, they might be spying.

3. Fight back with your own software 

Yes, some awful people have built apps that can be used for stalking, harassment and abuse. But others have built apps you can use to protect yourself.

A VPN, as discussed above, can hide the location your device is broadcasting from, giving your stalker false information. Yes, if you live in Houston, they might realize you’re not spending every day in Vancouver, but after that, they can’t do anything but fume.

Apps such as iAmNotified will send you a notification every time a third party gains access to your phone. You can also use a location data spoofer like iMyFone AnyTo to give out believable false geotracking data.

Finally, the big names in antivirus software — McAfee, Kaspersky, Avira and others — offer mobile apps you can use to protect your phone from spyware. While keeping you safe from hackers, these apps can also prevent tracking activity from spying apps.

4. Keep records 

If you suspect your phone is being tracked, start a log. Write down every time something suspicious happens, and add the date, time, location and as much evidence as possible. This can be given to crisis counselors, therapists, law enforcement and lawyers later on.

Final Thoughts on Geolocation Tracking & Privacy

Geolocation tracking is a technology, and like any technology, it can be used for good or ill. There are some legitimate reasons you might want your phone to know where you are: theft, emergency situations, being lost in a new city.

Yet when technology advances this quickly, it’s all too common for the bad guys to master it before the good guys do. That’s why knowing your rights and resources is so important.

Lately, we’re seeing signs that society is waking up to the danger of unregulated geotracking. In 2014, the U.S. made its first prosecution for distributing a spyware app. The legal precedent is there, but it’s going to take a lot of work from all of us to protect our Fourth Amendment rights.

Until then, stay alert and use a good VPN.

I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but we’re having ourselves a bit of a pandemic.

COVID-19 has driven everybody’s life online, and shopping is no exception. According to a survey conducted by the UN, online purchases have shot up in every industry, even as people have less money to spend.

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday approaching, lots of people are making the right choice: staying home from the superstore, and searching for deals online instead. A bargain on a 72-inch TV is nice, but not if all the money you save goes toward a trip to the ICU.

But while you may be safe from infection at home, that doesn’t mean you’re not taking any risks. In fact, if you ignore all the risks of shopping online and don’t follow common-sense precautions, you could be in for a different kind of virus altogether.

What Are the Risks of Online Shopping?

Like most things on the internet, there’s no sense in being paranoid. Of course there are all types of online risks out there, but this list is meant to educate you, not frighten you.

With that in mind, here are five of the biggest dangers of internet shopping.

1. Fake Online Stores

Ever see those “mockbuster” movies like Transmorphers or Atlantic Rim? You know, those awful films that are just distinct enough from major blockbusters to avoid a lawsuit, but similar enough that your grandma might purchase the DVD by accident.

Scammers use the same trick to cheat online shoppers out of their money. They’ll set up a storefront with an extremely similar name to a popular e-commerce site, and gussy everything up so it looks legit.

In reality, there’s no store, no products and no chance you’ll see your money again if you send it to them. You can try and get a refund from your credit card company, but if the company fails to answer chargeback requests and vanishes into thin air, you’re out of options.

2. Identity Theft

Online shopping is a major weak point that hackers love to exploit.

One of the most common tricks is to spy on a mark’s online activity, then call or email pretending to be the store the customer just ordered from. “There’s been a problem processing your payment,” they might say. “Could you give me your credit card details again?”

Or they might skip the social engineering and attack directly, by inserting some evil code into an honest website’s payment portal to get a shopper’s personal data. If it looks similar enough, customers will hand over their financial information willingly, without knowing what they’ve done.

3. Low-Quality Goods

Sometimes a store is technically on the up-and-up, but its merchandise is of such poor quality that it might as well be a criminal enterprise.

This is especially dangerous on sites like Wish, Amazon and eBay, who do almost nothing to restrict who’s allowed to sell. Customers have reported getting cheap replicas instead of the real article and, in some extreme cases, literally getting a photograph in the mail of the thing they thought they were buying.

The good news about getting scammed on a larger site is that you have a better chance of getting your money back. Even so, it pays to be overly skeptical about anything that seems like a great hidden deal, especially if there are no reviews.

Another tip: if you can’t find any information about a seller, they’re hiding it for a reason.

4. Email Spam

It starts off innocently. An online store asks you to make an account before you check out. Fair enough, you think — they probably just want to save my address for next time.

A few minutes later, the first message appears in your inbox. “Thanks for signing up for news alerts from CreepyAndOverbearing.com! We can’t wait to start on a wonderful journey together.”

But you didn’t buy a ticket for this journey. Now, you could be stuck unsubscribing from up to five different mailing lists, to say nothing of third parties they might be selling your information to. 

And that’s only the legitimate spam. Phishing sites can send you emails as well, and might even ask for personal information before you can unsubscribe.

5. Data Breaches

Anytime you add your information to an online database, there’s a risk it might be exposed. In March 2020, 8 million customer records on leading ecommerce websites were left lying out in the open for five days. No financial information was compromised, but plenty of personal details could be Googled by anybody during that time.

What can we learn from data breaches? You can’t expect a company to protect you, no matter how large. You’ve got to take your security into your own hands.

How Can You Protect Yourself From Online Shopping Risks?

Keep these tips in mind to avoid the dangers of shopping online.

• Verify reviews. Don’t trust a product just because it’s got a few glowing reviews — those could be from fake accounts. Research the reviewers and see if they have any other online presence: other reviews, social media profiles or account information on Amazon or eBay.
• Use a VPN. If you’re protecting yourself with a VPN like ExpressVPN, you’re much less likely to leak compromising information.
• Follow the news. Don’t wait for a company to tell you your data has been compromised. If you learn that a store you shopped at has suffered a leak, change your password immediately, then change it on any sites where you used the same one (you shouldn’t be doing that in the first place).
• Don’t give out personal information without an ironclad reason. If somebody emails asking for any personal info, no matter who they say they are, ask them to prove they work for the company they’re claiming to be from. You’ll probably never hear from them again.

Final Thoughts: Risks of Online Shopping

The one word to write on a sticky note and tape to your monitor before Black Friday: skepticism. Be suspicious of five-star reviews without details. Be extra suspicious of unfamiliar emails. And if a deal seems too good to be true…it probably is.

As long as you stay skeptical, you should have no trouble shopping online safely. Good luck, have fun and try not to shop while you’re in a turkey coma — trust me, it doesn’t lead to good decisions. Thanks for reading!

Have you had any bad experiences shopping online? Let us know in the comments.

The internet is not safe.

I know, it’s mean to start out with a bombshell like that. But I respect you, so I’m not going to lie to you. If you browse the internet without taking precautions, you risk being spied on, ripped off, or worse.

I would rather enter an abandoned house during a full moon and suggest that my friends all split up than browse the internet without any sort of security. Sure, I might get murdered. But at least I won’t have to live with a stolen identity.

Hackers can do all sorts of foul things with your IP address. They can easily mask their own address to look like yours, downloaded terabytes of illegal data, and put you on the hook for it — and that’s just one example.

I’m not saying horrible things will happen to everyone, or even to most people. But the potential consequences of totally unsecured browsing are so severe, and the precautions so simple, that there’s no reason not to be careful.

There’s a common misconception that the only people who need to browse the internet anonymously are people with something to hide — people downloading music illegally, spouses watching porn, or even outright criminals.

That’s no longer true (if it ever was). Online anonymity benefits everybody. It’s frighteningly easy for people with very little training to gain access to your credit card numbers, bank account information and personal passwords.

So how can you stay anonymous online?

You don’t need to be an expert in cybersecurity or an NSA analyst to hide your online traffic. In this article, we’ll explain how to stay safe in three easy steps — and go into detail about what (and who) you’re staying safe from.

What Do You Mean by Anonymous Browsing?

Every device capable of connecting to a network has a unique number called an IP address. Think of it as a signpost that your computer uses to tell websites where to send information.

When you boot up FerretOwners.com (I won’t judge), your computer sends a request to the server where FerretOwners.com lives, asking it to send the website to your IP address as a packet of information. Because of universal protocols agreed upon by web hosts, two devices can communicate even if they’ve never connected before.

Unfortunately, that also means that to get any of that sweet ferret content you crave, you need to make your identity publicly available online.

Your IP address is the stepping stone to tracking everything else about your online activity. If a third party can see your IP address, they can also see every request it makes to a website. And as any physicist can tell you, if you know something’s position and direction, you know everything.

The only way to actually browse anonymously is to ensure that nobody can see your IP address.

Why Browse Anonymously?

You know that old saying “you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide,” and how it’s complete BS?

I bet you can think of five reasons, right now, why somebody would want to be anonymous even if they weren’t doing anything wrong. Here’s my list:

• They work in a field like law or medicine where confidentiality is sacred.
• They have a stalker and are trying to ensure that person doesn’t find their new home address.
• They live under a repressive government that prosecutes people for the things they write online.
• They’re buying someone a bicycle helmet as a birthday present, but have zero interest in biking themselves, and don’t want to get bombarded with biking gear ads just because they looked it up on Amazon one time.
• They live in the United States but really want to watch The Great British Bake Off.

As you can see, reasons range from light to serious — and I’m willing to wager you came up with different ones.

Everybody faces the consequences of the steady erosion of online privacy. Even if you don’t think you’re being spied on, you are.

Here’s an example: If you use the same IP address to connect to multiple websites, people can begin following your trail. You know how you agree to enable “cookies” on every website you visit, just to get that annoying pop-up out of the way?

Cookies are information gatherers that follow your activity on a website. They can be used for benign purposes — for example, recording that you’ve already logged into a website, so you don’t have to reenter your credentials every time. But they can also be used to spy on you for advertising purposes.

Ads aren’t the worst of it, either. We described in the intro how hackers can use your identity to commit fraud and other crimes.

By this point, I hope I’ve convinced you to take your own online privacy seriously. Your next question is probably: “How do I stay anonymous online?”

Well, I did promise three easy steps.

Step by Step: How Do I Browse Anonymously?

Before we start, let’s get one thing out of the way: Incognito Mode is not anonymous browsing.

Most browsers have an Incognito Mode or similarly named option for private surfing. These only prevent information from being stored locally. As we’ve just learned, local storage isn’t the problem — the problem is that your browser is shouting your personal information every time you get online.

Here are three steps you can take to actually protect your privacy while you browse.

1. Update Your Browser Settings

The user policies of Chrome and Edge state that they can log any queries you type into the URL bar. They give these queries to their ad networks, or sell them to third parties who target invasive personalized ads at you.

Luckily, on both browsers, you can request that your search history not be used against you. To prevent Google from saving and using your searches on Chrome, click the top-right dots, then go to Settings → Sync and Google Services → Control how your browsing history is used to personalize search, ads, and more → Turn off Web & App Activity.

On Edge, go to Settings → Privacy → Diagnostics & Feedback → Tailored Experiences and set your browser not to tailor ads using your search history.

Apple’s privacy policy states that Safari does not connect user data with individual IPs, using data only to monitor aggregate trends.

Firefox sends data to the search engine without recording it. So if you’re using a privacy-focused search engine like DuckDuckGo, you should be good (more on that in a minute).

Tech companies are betting that you’ll let them do shady things because it’s more convenient. It’s a tale as old as time, dating back to the very first overly long user agreement that hid sinister privileges in the fine print. This means you can start protecting your privacy simply by studying up and refusing to consent.

With all that said, you should never trust people with your information just because they promise they won’t use it maliciously. Step 1 isn’t enough on its own.

2. Use a VPN for Browsing

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a tool that encrypts all the data you send from your device to your ISP.

Normally, a request to view a website goes to your ISP first, enabling it to log your activity. With a VPN, all requests are filtered through an anonymous server. All your ISP sees is the VPN — you become a nonentity.

Not all VPNs are trustworthy. Some slow down your connection, some don’t work and some actually log your browsing information for themselves.

That said, don’t fall into the trap of assuming that all VPNs are out to get you. Our favorite, ExpressVPN, is fast, tightly secured, and promises to never save user web browsing activity. Of course, we wouldn’t trust that promise without verifying, but ExpressVPN comes out clean; it’s been around since 2009, and has never been caught selling user data.

3. Install an Ad Blocker

Ad blockers keep you from being bombarded with annoying banners and videos, but the best ones do even more than that. Tools such as uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger block the cookies and trackers that follow your IP address across the net to spam you with invasive ads.

I don’t endorse any silver bullets for online privacy. There’s no one app that will keep you safe forever. But if you combine education with a suite of battle-tested tools, you can enjoy the marvels of the internet stress-free.

10 Ways to Stay Anonymous Online

When it comes to the full array of anonymous browsing tools, we haven’t yet scratched the surface. Governments, corporations, and hackers are powerful, but so are the people working on your side.

Remember, the key to anonymous browsing is to mask your IP address so that your DNS requests (messages from your device asking to see a web page) can’t be traced back to your device. The following 10 tools help you do that in different ways.

1. VPNs

I mentioned them already, but I’m going to mention them again: you should never be on the internet without a virtual private network. These networks launder your connection to keep information from your ISP. In addition, every connection you make through a VPN is encrypted, usually with nearly unbreakable AES-256 encoding.

That means signal tracers can’t follow your request back to your home device. As an added bonus, you can use them to access region-locked content, like BBC shows outside the UK.

ExpressVPN is my personal choice, and a clear leader in every category: price, speed, security and ease of use. NordVPN and CyberGhost are also superior options. If you don’t have the budget for a new app right now, lots of VPNs offer robust free plans, with the best being Windscribe.

2. Anonymous Proxy Servers

An anonymous proxy is the light beer version of a VPN. It has the same purpose as a VPN — running your web requests through an unrelated server (the proxy) so third parties can’t see where they’re coming from.

Unfortunately, proxies are missing the VPN secret sauce: encryption. Without encryption, your requests can easily be traced back to your real IP address and physical location.

This makes proxies only suitable for light mischief, like watching a video in a region where it’s not available. A proxy server might hide your activity from a site that gets millions of requests per day, but it won’t secure your data against a determined hacker.

If you have to get past a content filter but don’t require strict privacy, a proxy can be nice. They’re almost all free, or at least cheaper than a VPN subscription. Try FreeProxy, Ultrasurf, Privoxy, Java Anon Proxy or CGIProxy.

3. Tor Network

Tor is a network that has long been popular among the sort of people who liquidate all their assets to buy litecoin, but it’s been receiving more mainstream attention lately. I’ve seen it held up as the ultimate form of online security, and even the only way to be truly anonymous.

Do I buy that? Not really.

Tor uses a technique called “onion routing” to mask web traffic. When your device makes a request, Tor shuffles it randomly around the nodes in its network, adding a new layer of encryption each time. The final “exit node” then peels back the encryption like the layers of an onion.

In theory, it’s supposed to be impossible to follow this trail back to its origin. In practice… not so much. MIT scientists managed to use certain fingerprints to track onion-routed traffic, without needing to break secure encryption at all.

More concerning is that the individual nodes are all volunteer-maintained, and there’s no background check whatsoever. In fact, out of fear that malicious volunteers will use their nodes to stick malware on passing connections, many websites block all Tor exit nodes on principle.

Tor is free to use, and it’s nice that you don’t have to trust anybody not to break a user agreement. You can download the proxy app or use Tor Browser, a web browser with onion-routing built in. However, onion-routing your traffic is an act of faith, and you have to understand that some websites don’t want to make that leap with you.

4. Private Search Engine

Search history is one of the biggest points of vulnerability in your online privacy. Not only do search engines save your history for marketing purposes, they often leave it lying around where anybody can find it. Just last month, 70 million Bing users had their search history exposed.

The only way to search safely is to choose a search engine that doesn’t save user history at all (hint: not Google). DuckDuckGo, built on the Yahoo engine, is the best known, but I also like Gibiru, which weights results in favor of sites that are buried by Google’s algorithm.

If you can’t get results you like from anybody but Google, try Startpage. It runs a Google search without sending any details about your device, leaving no connection between you and your search history.

5. Anonymous Browsers 

One of the biggest risks to your online security is your web browser itself. Secure browsers build in many of the features you’d otherwise be getting piecemeal, including log-free search engines, encrypted traffic, ad blockers, malware protection and password vaults.

Tor Browser is one of the best known, but comes with a lot of baggage (see #3). Orfox uses much of the same code as Tor.

Epic Privacy Browser will be familiar to anybody who’s used to Chrome. It’s built on Google’s open-source Chromium platform, but it has a full suite of privacy settings enabled by default. If you’re more used to Firefox, try Comodo IceDragon, a version of Firefox with enhanced security.

xB Browser is another nice option based on Firefox. It blocks all ads, and completely eliminates all your history every time you close the browser.

6. Anonymous Email

Emails you send through leading platforms like Gmail are usually encrypted, but not as strongly as they could be. Gmail encrypts emails so they can’t be read by third parties — but they can still be read by Gmail itself. And we’ve already seen what Google does with your private information (ads on ads on ads).

Anonymous email services go one step further and offer end-to-end encryption. This means that nobody can read any message except for its sender and recipients. Not even the people who run the server can see the content.

ProtonMail was first into this space and is still trusted by privacy-seekers worldwide. Tutanota is a great alternative. Both can be used free of charge, though you’ll have to get a new email address on their domains.

If you don’t want to deal with a new address, try Mailvelope. It’s an extension for Chrome, Firefox and Edge that encrypts any Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook or GMX message end to end.

7. Change Privacy Settings

From my three-step guide above, you’ve already learned how to change your browser settings to limit what they can do with your private data (in theory, at least). To go the extra mile, you should also change your settings on social media.

The best way to stay secure on social media is to get the hell off of it. Not only will you be less vulnerable to data harvesting and social engineering attacks, you also won’t have to see your ex’s vacation photos or listen to your uncle ranting about chemtrails. (Seriously, I just deleted Twitter, and it’s been amazing so far.)

But if you can’t get off social media for whatever reason, there are still things you can do to use it more safely. On Facebook, stop giving third-party apps permission to view your profile — that’s how Cambridge Analytica got all that user information. Make sure to set all your posts so that only friends can see them.

Twitter removed some important privacy features earlier this year, but you can still protect against targeted advertising by going to Settings and Privacy → Privacy and Safety, then turning off all Personalizations and Data. Consider making your account private so that nobody can see your tweets if they aren’t following you.

8. Browser Extensions

Browser extensions are excellent security tools because they don’t require you to change your habits all that much. We’ve already learned of one extension, Mailvelope, that fits seamlessly into your current browsing experience — it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

For instance, there’s anonymoX, a user-friendly IP switcher that lets you activate a proxy with a single click. Like other proxies, it’s not encrypted traffic, but it makes you practically untraceable when used in concert with a VPN. Even better news: lots of the best VPNs have their own browser extensions.

9. Password Managers

You also owe it to yourself to take a look at LastPass, which deals with a problem we haven’t touched on much until now: password management. One of the simplest ways to hack someone’s personal accounts is to get basic personal information on them, then make educated guesses about their passwords.

With LastPass, you can make your passwords as ludicrously long as you want, and the extension will remember them for you. It’s like writing them down on sticky notes, except LastPass can’t be stolen. All you need to remember is one master password.

10. Anonymous Apps

Some digital natives, concerned about online privacy but still hungry for the connective power of social media, turn to anonymous apps — social media platforms where nobody has a profile.

I can’t recommend these. In practice, they either degenerate into cyberbullying dystopias (like Yik Yak) or turn out to have been harvesting everyone’s data from the back end all along (like Whisper). Maybe someday an anonymous app will come along that actually seems committed to user privacy, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Dishonorable Mention: Incognito Mode

Time for some boldface again, in case anyone forgot: Incognito Mode is not anonymous browsing.

Incognito mode does nothing to hide your IP address from the internet. It hides your browsing history from other users on your device. It’s for when you don’t want your spouse to see that you’ve been shopping for a present for them, or don’t want your parents to discover you’ve been on Pornhub. Do not rely on it for security.

Final Thoughts on Anonymous Browsing

The internet is a wonderful place. In many ways, it’s fulfilled and surpassed our early expectations of what it could do. Billions of people have found communities, received timely aid and accessed knowledge that was previously locked away.

You know what else is a wonderful, magical place? The backwoods of Olympic National Park. I love it there, but I wouldn’t dare go in without a solid plan. There are bears.

Anonymous browsing tools aren’t about fear, but preparedness. Logging on with a VPN, using a secure search engine and updating your privacy settings are like bringing your signal mirror and bear spray into the woods.

Our favorite way to stay secure online is to use ExpressVPN. I promise that after a few minutes you won’t even notice it’s there.

Check out the comments below, and let us know if you have a favorite anonymous browsing tool we didn’t mention!

Try BEFORE you Buy!
Install now the FREE fully functional trial version and make sure that Anonymous Friend is working properly on your system and its features and functionalities suits your needs.

If you have not tested the product first, no refund request will be accepted from you on such basis.

When Facebook first caught on in the early aughts, suggesting that the President of the United States would ever be on the platform would have raised eyebrows. Yet until January 2021, it was hard to imagine that a president would ever be kicked off.

Of course, former President Trump is far from the first person to get banned from Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. You can get banned from social media for any number of reasons, and not just for objectively bad choices like harassment, spam or hate speech.

Maybe you’re from a country with a more relaxed attitude toward nudity than the United States, and weren’t aware of how many Americans are terrified of exposed nipples. Or perhaps you posted content that accidentally mirrored common spam. The truth is, there are many ways that can end up with you unable to access your favorite social media site.

So, if you — the average Joe or Jane — get kicked off a social network platform, what options do you have? More than you might think. If you’ve been banned from Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, this article is your comprehensive guide for getting your profile back.

Banned From Facebook: No More Likes for You

Getting banned from Facebook is sometimes referred to as Facebook Jail. Since Facebook pledged in 2019 to get more serious about creating a friendly community, bans and penalties have increased across the network.

Moderation on Facebook has a messy history. In May 2020, a class-action lawsuit alleged that contractors hired to remove harmful content on the social network were suffering from PTSD from having to view horrific images all day.

Facebook settled the case for $52 million, then applied their usual prescription: more AI. Ideally, algorithms would filter out the truly awful activity, leaving only the marginal cases for human moderators. In practice, artificially intelligent moderation has proven to be difficult to train.

Luckily, if you do get caught up in the AI dragnet, you can appeal your case. Before I get into that, though, it’s important to understand that not all sentences are equal in Facebook Jail.

What Happens When You Get Banned From Facebook?

Broadly, Facebook users can get hit with two different types of bans: from user-run communities or from the network as a whole.

If you get banned by administrators of groups or pages, you can still share content from the page on your own timeline, but you can’t interact with the community itself in any way — no likes, no comments, no posts. Admins can ban users from groups for any reason. There’s no agreement that protects your rights in a user-run community.

If you’ve been suspended or banned by Facebook itself, you’ll discover it when you log in. The severity of penalties varies widely, but they try to ensure that the punishment fits the crime. For example, if the AI thinks you’ve been spamming posts, you’ll be banned from posting.

Your Facebook account can be temporarily suspended for a first offense. A temporary ban lasts up to 21 days. Repeated infractions can get your account shut down permanently. If you think you’re being punished in error, it’s important to appeal the very first time.

How to Get Unbanned From Facebook

Facebook will send you a message informing you of the ban. If you got banned from some features but can still access your Facebook account, the notice will land in your inbox. Otherwise, it’ll go to your email.

No matter how you get the news, it should be accompanied by instructions for appealing the decision. Make sure to read them in full.

If your ban isn’t permanent, the best way to unban yourself is to simply wait. However, this isn’t an option for people who make their living on Facebook Marketplace or rely on Facebook ads to bring in business. If your situation is urgent, it’s time to appeal your ban.

Step by Step: How to Appeal a Facebook Ban

There are two ways to access the appeal page. Either log in to your disabled account and click the blue “Submit Appeal” button on the message that appears, or go to this Facebook appeal link. (Note that the link may not always work — Facebook has left a few appeal links broken over the years).

• The email or phone number associated with your Facebook account
• The full name used on your account
• A scanned and uploaded government-issued ID confirming your name

Finally, you’ll hit the “additional info” box. This is where you have the chance to state your case. Briefly but clearly explain why your ban should be revoked, keeping the following tips in mind:

• Use punctuated, grammatically correct English. If you’re a bad writer or a non-native speaker, run it through Grammarly or have a friend help.
• Don’t bother with emotional appeals. These people work at Facebook. They crushed their feelings long ago. Your sob story is more likely to hurt your case than help. Stick to the facts.
• If you’re responsible for your ban, admit it. You may not agree with the policy that got you banned, and that’s fine. Even so, if it’s your fault, apologize and explain why you can be trusted not to do it again. Remember that you don’t have a right to a Facebook profile — you’re a customer, and they can refuse service for any reason.
• If you’re not responsible, say so clearly. This could be the first time a human being has learned about your ban. Human moderators can spot abuse in ways that the AI can’t.

Even if you get banned permanently, you can start over with a new profile. Facebook doesn’t block IP addresses, given how easy they are to change. You’ll need to add all your friends and content all over again, but at least you can stay in touch with people once more.

Banned From Twitter: Zero Character Limit

Twitter holds its users to a few community standards that are mostly uncontroversial. It bans threats of violence, stalking, graphic images and the like. If you’re here seeking to get your Twitter account back after you used it to send someone a death threat, get off our website and go think about all of your life choices.

However, just like on Facebook, it’s easy to get yourself banned from Twitter for something you didn’t know was against the rules. For example, lots of people drive traffic to their blog posts by tweeting the same link multiple times per day. Sometimes a person will tweet the same link from two or three accounts they hold.

Previously, that was fine. Then the rules changed. Suddenly, a bunch of harmless bloggers found themselves suspended for spam.

Twitter is a volatile environment. If you wade onto the 280-character battlefields, you should be prepared to face the ban hammer. Here’s everything you need to know about getting unbanned from Twitter.

What Happens When You Get Banned From Twitter?

Twitter claims that the majority of accounts they suspend are bots, but they admit that real people can get caught in the crossfire. As on Facebook, you can get suspended or banned from Twitter if someone inaccurately reports you as a fake account. Twitter can also suspend your account if they think it’s been hacked.

Also like Facebook, Twitter has some slap-on-the-wrist penalties that they’ll hit offenders with before breaking out a permanent ban.

The first thing they might do is flag a tweet that breaks the rules. If they do this, you’ll get a choice: delete the tweet or appeal the flag, explaining why the rules weren’t actually broken. Unless you genuinely don’t think you made an error, deleting it outright is the best way to stay out of further trouble.

The next step is for Twitter to place your account in read-only mode. You won’t be allowed to tweet for up to a week, although you can see your timeline and exchange DMs with followers. Read-only mode is a temporary time-out for normally law-abiding users who might be having a rough few days.

To get your account permanently banned, you either have to repeatedly break the rules after multiple warnings, or conduct yourself so egregiously one time that Twitter can’t look the other way.

How to Unban Yourself From Twitter

Twitter’s help pages offer the average suspended user hope that they can get their account back.

If your account was suspended because Twitter suspects you’ve been hacked, you’ll be asked to change your password. After that, you’ll get your account back as normal.

For your first violation of the Twitter rules, you can get your account back by completing a simple CAPTCHA to verify that you’re not a bot. Twitter is on constant red alert against bots because of how easy they are to make. Proving you’re flesh and blood is often enough to get you tweeting again.

If your alleged violation was epically serious, or you’ve got repeated poor conduct complaints on your record, the only way to get your account back is to appeal. 

Step by Step: How to Appeal a Suspended Twitter Account

To appeal, first log in to your suspended account, then fill out this appeal form.

Our suggestions for Facebook appeals also apply here. Write cleanly, skip the sob story, and if you’re actually at fault, show remorse. Twitter is a business, so you need to explain to them why you’re not a threat to their bottom line — i.e. that you won’t be a recurring menace who drives other users away.

Banned From YouTube: You’re off the Air

Prior to 2020, Belle Delphine was probably best known for selling her bathwater to fans. But last year, she racked up mentions by becoming a pro at getting banned from things. In July, Delphine lost her Instagram. In November, her YouTube channel was briefly taken down, then reinstated. She’s also banned from TikTok.

Delphine is an interesting case because she’s not like the other people you see getting banned. She didn’t deny the Holocaust, beat her partner on camera, or call for any politicians to be drawn and quartered.

All her troubles come from posting sexual content. Whatever you think of her, you have to admit she’s got a point: it’s weird for YouTube to find the video for “WAP” acceptable but declare that her activity somehow crosses a line.

Personally, I think YouTube intended to keep Delphine’s channel banned for good, but backtracked when hit with public outcry. But what if you get banned from YouTube and don’t have a horde of thirsty gamers ready to take up arms for your cause?

What Happens When YouTube Suspends Your Account?

YouTube can suspend both channels and accounts. Your account can get locked if you’re found to have a history of abusive comments, or if it’s found that the entire purpose of the account or channel is to do abusive things.

For your first violation — unless it’s extremely bad (stalking or preying on someone) — you’ll get a warning. For a second violation, you’ll get your first strike, which means you can’t upload content for a week.

Strike records disappear after 90 days. If you get a second strike while your first strike is still on your record, you’ll be banned from posting for two weeks. Three strikes means a permanent removal.

It’s also possible, if one of your videos is right on the border of a policy violation, that YouTube will limit its features instead of giving you a full strike. Limited features means the video is still online and visible, but it’s slapped with a warning message and stripped of comments, suggestions and ads.

One last note: YouTube considers copyright violations to be separate from content violations. If you get a copyright strike by posting content that mirrors someone else’s without crediting them, you’ll have to complete a training course before getting your privileges back. Three strikes in either category will get you a ban.

Step by Step: How to Unban Yourself From YouTube

If you get a strike, you’ll receive notifications explaining why. The first thing to not do here is delete the offending video. That won’t remove the strike.

You can appeal a strike by visiting your dashboard, selecting “channel violations,” and clicking “appeal.” If your video got appealed without a strike, find that video in your creator studio, look for the “restrictions” column, mouse over the restriction, and click “appeal.”

Write out the reason you think YouTube made a mistake. As before, take time to really think about whether the error was on your end. If you’ve reviewed the guidelines repeatedly and still don’t think the reasons for your strike make sense, write a concise paragraph explaining why. You can only appeal each strike once, so don’t send until you’re ready.

YouTube staff will review the appeal. If they agree with your argument, you’ll be unbanned immediately, and the strike will be gone from your record. If they don’t, there’s no further penalty (though I still recommend against insulting their mothers during your appeal).

In some cases, they might decide the content is fine, but not for all audiences. They’ll put your video back with an 18+ age restriction, which also makes it invisible to people who are not signed in.

How to Appeal Copyright Strikes

Copyright strikes are a little different. You’ve got two options: get the person who made the claim of copyright infringement against you to retract it, or submit a counter notification arguing that you didn’t violate their copyright.

If you plan to submit a counter notification, think about whether your video qualifies for a “Fair Use” exemption. In the United States, it’s OK to use somebody else’s content for journalism, criticism, parody or education. However, “Fair Use” is not a magic spell — it’s determined case by case. If you aren’t sure, have a lawyer look at your video first.

Final Thoughts: Banned From Your Favorite Sites or Apps

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution reads, in part: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.” For better or for worse, that doesn’t apply to everything you say. The government isn’t allowed to restrict speech in public, but social media sites — despite how public they feel — are still technically private spaces.

What do you think of our guide on how to avoid the Facebook, Twitter and YouTube bans? Have you ever been struck by the ban hammer? Do you think the bans are fair? Tell us all about it, and thanks for reading.