Hide My Ass! is arguably the best free proxy service. It allows you to surf online “anonymously”, “hide” your IP address, and protect your “privacy”. The service acts as a middle man between your computer and the internet. It is an open proxy service which means it is available to any internet user. Proxies were once thought as only useful for breaking into other computer systems, viewing pornography, and spreading illegal content (like spam). However, with surveillance programs like PRISM all too real, anyone who doesn’t want their browsing history to be on record should be using a proxy service at the very least.
While proxies do add a layer of protection and privacy to whatever you are doing online, it is entirely possible that you will get caught anyway. There is a case where a certain high profile hacker had his IP address released by Hide My Ass! From this we see that Hide My Ass! does keep logs of your activity and that Hide My Ass! will not protect your ass when lawyers come knocking at their door.
Using Hide My Ass! is straight forward. You can connect to any website through their proxy by going to their home page and entering the URL.
Even the Best Free Proxy Service Will Slow You Down
Comparing the page load times of our old homepage by connecting to it directly and with Hide My Ass!, we see that using a proxy service significantly decreases speed. In this single test, our homepage loaded in 842ms by directly connecting to it. On the other hand, when using Hide My Ass! the page load time jumped up to 1.81s. Hide My Ass! ended up slowing down the page load speed by 115%.
[row][div class=”col-xs-6″]
Load Time Without Hide My Ass!
[/div][div class=”col-xs-6″]
Load Time With Hide My Ass!
[/div][/row]
If you are using Hide My Ass! to unblock restricted content then that’s great. However, since Hide My Ass! logs activity, you should use another proxy service if you are doing anything else. But before you go searching for a proxy service you should fully educate yourself on internet anonymity and all the reasons it does not exist. It is entirely possible that one day all the logs of these proxy servers will be publicly available – you have been forewarned.
Hide My Ass! offers the proxy service as a way of funneling customers into their premium VPN plan. With a VPN, your connection will be much more secure and maybe even faster. However, there are other alternatives that may be worth investigating. This article only covers Hide My Ass! as the best free proxy service. Using their VPN will afford you protection on your mobile devices. Android users can follow this guide to set up Hide My Ass! VPN functionality and iPhone users can use this guide.
