Step 7: Bypassing Censorship
To get around technical website filters, most circumvention tools simply ask a server in some other country to fetch blocked websites for them. This server is known as a proxy.
As long as the censorship software you are trying to bypass has not added your proxy to its blacklist, in addition to the blocked content itself, this technique works quite well.
That said, there are a few other considerations to keep in mind when choosing circumvention software.
Choosing a Proxy
Before choosing a proxy, it is important make sure that it meets the following criteria:
You must trust the provider.
While the ISP may not be able to see the full scope of your internet activity when you use a proxy, whoever is running the proxy server can.
Because you are relying on this server to relay your requests to the desired website (and deliver its responses back to you), it is important that you trust the tool provider to not submit your Internet activity to a third party. The proxy provider’s Terms of Service or Privacy Policy might be a good place to start.
It should provide an encrypted connection for your traffic. When you use a tool to proxy your Internet traffic, it is important that your connection to the proxy server be encrypted. In addition, you must ensure that the connection between your proxy server and the destination site is also encrypted.
This assumes that you are requesting content from a secure server, such as an HTTPS website; not all website-based proxies provide this level of security.
It should provide an encrypted connection for other sensitive data.
Furthermore, even a website-based proxy that does encrypt both ends of the proxied connection may itself be able to access your sensitive content, including your passwords.
This generally presents an unacceptable risk, so you are almost certainly better off using a technology that is known to provide a single, encrypted tunnel all the way from your device, through one or more proxies, to the content you are trying to access. Examples include VPNs and Tor, as discussed below.