你可能听过其他人讨论过在工作中使用代理绕过web过滤器，或者匿名浏览internet，但是你想知道代理是否真的对你有用。今天的帖子将介绍代理可以给你的浏览体验带来的好处。

今天的问答环节是由SuperUser提供的，SuperUser是Stack Exchange的一个分支，是一个由社区驱动的问答网站分组。

问题

超级用户读者Breebran想知道使用代理的好处：

I know students and employees use them to get by web filters. But what else? I hear about “privacy and security”, but I can never find anything really explaining it.

I did see one link that said it stops pages from putting cookies on your computer. But why is that such a big deal when you can just use CCleaner to get rid of them?

What are the benefits of using one?

一个普通人能从代理中受益吗？对于那些选择使用代理使其值得的人来说，有足够的好处吗？

答案

超级用户贡献者gronostaj为我们提供了答案：

Bypassing filters isn’t the reason why proxies were invented. A basic advantage of using them is that they make you more anonymous. This is how you’re connecting to websites when browsing without a proxy:

You’re connecting directly to the server.

• It knows your external IP – that’s a piece of information about you, probably not enough to identify you with certainty, but enough to find out your approximate geographical location.
• It knows the cookies you have on your computer – you may delete them later, but you definitely don’t delete them each time you load a website.
• It knows what browser you’re using and what plugins you have installed. Every time you visit a website, your browser sends the User Agent string which can be used to identify a browser, its version, OS version, and sometimes installed browser extensi***.
• It knows where you’re coming from. An HTTP referrer (sic!) is sent each time you click a link. Basically, when you navigate from one site to another, the target site will know the URL or previous site.

You can try to block cookies, UAs, and referrers in your browser, but there are more programs that use HTTP. Most of them won’t let you tamper with such settings. That’s where we can use a proxy:

Now all your network traffic is passing through the proxy and it can alter it:

• It can replace the User Agent string with some meaningless string or strip out the referrers.
• It can accept all cookies, but not pass them to you, or it can block them altogether.
• It’s the proxy that’s connecting to the server, not you, so your IP isn’t disclosed.
• A proxy can be set up to work system-wide, so programs won’t be able to bypass it.

There are also some extra features that a proxy can provide:

• It can compress your traffic to save some bandwidth.
• It can cache files to give a little boost to page load times.
• It can strip ads from websites before they reach your computer.
• It can block malicious websites.

And finally, it can be used not only against filters, but also as a filter!

如上面的解释所示，在浏览互联网时，使用代理肯定可以在许多方面让用户受益。

有什么要补充的解释吗？在评论中发出声音。想从其他精通技术的Stack Exchange用户那里了解更多答案吗？在这里查看完整的讨论主题。