When navigating on the internet you computer is assigned a personal address, a unique IP. This means that the internet service provider, the visited websites and any spy on the internet connection can track your moves around the internet. All this can be made is encryption is not used by the navigator. Your visit on the internet can be registered and used later to gather some personal information about you. Your online privacy can be lost if unscrupulous persons get your home IP address as they use it to obtain access to your hard drive and your personal details.

In order to navigate safely on the internet you must use an anonymous proxy which will hide your IP address and so no one will be able to access your computer via the network. Most of the proxy servers are transmitting your request of having your IP address hidden towards the target server and in this way they do not completely hide your IP. The real anonymous proxy servers are not giving away this information and so your IP is safe from eavesdroppers. Real anonymous proxy server does not send HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR variable to host, this way improving privacy since your IP address cannot be logged. Some of these anonymous proxy servers have the ability of hiding the information that you even use a proxy server. For example, an elite proxy (high anonymity) does not send HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR, HTTP_VIA and HTTP_PROXY_CONNECTION variables and so, the host has no idea that you are using proxy server and does not find out your IP address either.

The proxy server will provide its own IP address when you visit a site. They also increase the speed of navigation as they save information and files that are requested by many users in a special database what is called "cache". Any new request that asks for information already in the cache no longer needs to be serviced by fetching it from the remote server.

These anonymizers can be free or you can buy them from the internet depending of the protection type you need for your computer. These proxies do not only mask your IP address but they can also manage cookies to prevent monitoring of your network traffic.