Staying safe when you work through a proxy
What the proxy owner can see, what not to do even on your own port and how small details cost people their accounts.
A proxy is an intermediary your traffic passes through. Even when the intermediary is trustworthy, security habits are worth keeping.
Encryption matters more than the proxy
HTTPS encrypts the request body before it enters the tunnel, so the proxy owner sees the destination but not the contents. Anything sent over plain HTTP is readable at any intermediate hop, and a proxy is no different from public Wi-Fi in that respect.
Rules that save accounts
- Do not mix personal and work profiles on the same port.
- Do not switch the proxy country on an account that has signed in from one region for years.
- Store port credentials the way you store passwords: in a manager, not in notes and chats.
- Change the port password if it might have leaked with a config file or a screenshot.
Leaks around the proxy
The most common cause of a failure is not the proxy but the setup around it: DNS queries bypassing the tunnel, WebRTC in the browser, a timezone and interface language that do not match the country of the address. Test the whole stack, not just the IP that gets detected.
We never pass carrier credentials to clients and never show staff more than they need: the connection runs through a gateway with a separate login and password.