You have made a lot of valid points.

My main concern about the use of proxy servers is when they are used to mask the location of a user for purposes of credit card fraud.

I am aware of the rumors that some ISPs sell profiles. I have also heard that they are required by law to keep track of some user activities, but I have never been able to confirm that. Heck, Google profiles everyone’s activities and are about to launch a new version of their ad network that will customize ads based upon the types of sites a user commonly visits. Their search results will be customized in a similar manner by the end of 2009.

My point about legitimate proxies is that the use of a scammer proxy allows the proxy owner to track all of your activity, including User IDs and passwords. We are now finding out that even MD5 encryption can be cracked. If you are going to use any proxy, do not use it for sites where you need to enter sensitive information.

How do you determine if a proxy is legitimate? I do not have an answer for that one. The proxy owners that I know do run legitimate proxies. But there are literally thousands of proxy sites out there, and many are run by people who reside in countries where there are no laws against capturing private info. I would be more concerned about that, than I would about anything your ISP or the government is doing.

I share your concerns about privacy, but when it gets down to it, there really isn’t any such thing a real privacy today unless you want to move to the mountains and live in a cabin with no electricity or running water. A certain amount of surveillance is necessary by law enforcement agencies if you want them to catch the bad guys before they do something bad. I do not have a concern about the government monitoring things as long as it is used for legitimate purposes, but I draw the line after that.

If you are not doing anything illegal, and the information collected is not used for any suspicious purposes, and you cannot do anything about it, I would not spend much time worrying about it.

Quote : “If you are going to use a proxy server, try to identify those that are legitimate. Many are, but some are not.”

Exactly how do you do that? As far as I know there is no way to accomplish what you suggest here.
Most people don’t know that their ISP has nefarious dealings with statistics and user tracking companies that build private profiles on people without their consent. ISP’s (we are talking about major names here) allow these companies unhindered access to IP traffic by forcing all traffic through invisible web proxy gateways and giving these companies unhindered access to customer data.
In turn these private database companies keeps every bit of information they can harvest through the connections the customers are making and storing them in databases which are linked to real data, and private information.

Web proxies that support encryption to and from the the gateway are one way to avoid the illegal monitoring and eavesdropping that takes place by major ISP’s. The only problem?
Your ISP knows this, and if you try to use a non-encrypted search engine to find a VPN or Proxy service they will intercept and filter out options and replace them with their own in house services.
They have been doing this for several years now and the public seems completely unaware of this issue.

I have an issue with your article because it doesn’t address the real need for proxies, and that is to prevent your internet providers from profiling you and selling your “very” private information.
If you use your internet connection to search for secure gateways from which to browse and prevent illegal profiling, you will find that your traffic is being watched and manipulated to the point that you can’t even trust the services you are looking for.

I know of no way around these issues, and it makes me very angry. I have nothing to hide, but I also demand equal right access to the information that is being stored about me. I also demand the right to remove said information. In our current corporate/political atmosphere, you only have the right to be spied on.