Ever wonder how we get all those spam emails selling us stuff; saying that we have been pre-approved for a certain credit card; or offering us many different things from playing online casino to subscribing to pay-per-view shows and such?

There are a lot of reasons why we get all these kinds of emails; one of which is that our email address has been sold to a third-party buyer when we signed-up for certain online promos.

Another bigger reason is that our browsing habits have been monitored and tracked down by other websites who use trackers specifically for the purpose of marketing.

How do they track us down? They do this by using our Internet Protocol addresses. This is where an HTTP Proxy can come into play. What are these?

IP ADDRESSES AND HTTP PROXIES

IP ADDRESS

To know the answer to What are HTTP Proxies?; we must first understand what an IP Address is. Simply put, an IP Address is the configuration that the computer network has designated to our computers.

The IP Address allows other computers to connect to us when we are online to give us information on things we are looking for or to hook us up to the websites that we want to browse.

With this unique number configuration, it will be easy for internet predators to track down our browsing habits; from the sites that we frequent to our location. But these are not all that our IP Address can reveal about us.

Identity thefts; credit card fraud and other online malicious activities may befall us all because of our IP Address.

HTTP PROXIES

Now these are alternative servers that we can use when surfing the internet to allow our own IP Address to be hidden from online predators.

These will send information to the World Wide Web through an anonymous proxy server so that our online computer identity will not be open to the internet network.

To further understand What are HTTP Proxies?; what happens when we use them is that when we send information to the internet using any one of these HTTP Proxies; they use their own IP Address instead of ours.

We may think that this is already the solution we are looking for to prevent malicious hackers from using our identities but there's more to What are HTTP Proxies? than just hiding our identities.

There are open HTTP Proxies that can do more damage to us than our own IP Addresses. These types of proxy servers are often manipulated by again, malicious users to control our computers to hack into or attack other computers; using us as the end-user.

The more reliable proxy servers are what we call Web-based HTTP Proxies. These do not require downloads or configuring our browsers; and these operate solely through Web browsers.

Now that we know a few things about the question What are HTTP Proxies?; it is solely upon our own discretion whether we want to use these or not. We should first weigh the pros and cons of using these proxy servers before using them.




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