If you want to keep your online activity private and secure, you should work with VPN providers that adhere to an no-logs policy. This means they won’t keep or track any of your online activities or file sharing. As such, they won’t be able to sell it to third-party companies. In general commercial VPN services also have more resources and infrastructure than free proxies and tend to provide faster connections.
Both a proxy as well as a VPN will allow you to keep some degree of privacy, however the way they do so differs. A VPN protects your entire web traffic from beginning until the end, while a proxy merely redirects data within your browser.
Proxy servers are great for basic tasks like obscuring your location and avoiding content restrictions, but they don’t protect against sophisticated attacks like insider threats, APTs or privileged account escalations. They are a great tool to enforce internal security policies for example, limiting internet access on company time or restricting specific websites to countries where the company is located.
One disadvantage of using a proxy is that it’s difficult to switch server locations at the click of a button as you can with a VPN application. Additionally, because the proxy doesn’t encrypt your data, it may slow down the speed hosted record management solution of your connection. If you’re looking for more than just an average proxy, we suggest you investigate the premium VPN services as they offer everything that a standard proxy does as well as many other features.