You've been doing all the right things. You change passwords regularly, you clear your cookies (and not just the ones in your jar), you are very cautious about deleting your browsing history whenever you are on a shared computer, you also encrypt your mails, and you don't download software unless you're really, really sure of everything. But even with all that, aren't you forgetting something? Your ISP!

Let's face it - you can never be 100% private and secure on the internet. In fact, a judge in Ontario ruled that ‘there can be no reasonable expectation of privacy online' while dealing with a case allowing police officers to obtain any individual's name, address and other details from the IP addresses alone WITHOUT a search warrant. (So much for Data Privacy Day) but isn't it completely violating to know that your ISP will blatantly share you browsing details, and other information we keep leaving online with other companies and that there is nothing you can do to stop them, or even know if and when they collect this information? 

It's true - your ISP has complete access to everything you send or receive online. Of course, they may not be actually doing it, but potentially they form the biggest danger to internet users all over the world - this according to a Law School Prof in Colorado, Paul Ohms. According to him, "ISPs pose a much greater threat to privacy than other online entities and they even pose a greater threat than offline institutions as well, including doctors, psychiatrists, and lawyers." And there are two factors contributing to this: deep packet inspection technology and methods and increasing pressure from the companies and online marketers. 

Recall, Webwise by Phorm - the technology that offers ISPs the option of showing targeted ads to their subscribers based on their preferences (by knowing what they do online) and it's only a matter of time before sophisticated technology comes into the picture and your ISP will snoop around your private data. However, law makers are on the side of the consumers so far, with one US Court of Appeals in Columbia denying a petition by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association to override the privacy rules that they are bound by which makes it difficult for them to share subscribers personal info with third parties. Thank God for that! 

Proxy servers can do a lot more than just keep your privacy with you. Of course, all the other things it can do stem from that basic function; but it's just that this particular feature can actually be put to various uses and advantages - one of which is downloading faster, especially with torrents.

Anyone who's a full-on downloader online knows of torrents and how they get you the best of movies and music and television shows, mostly for free. However, something most users know or don't know is that your ISP is not really very happy about you being so happy. That's because anyone downloading huge files via torrents are hogging the bandwidth, meaning less traffic for them potentially. And since it's the "almighty" ISP, he can see very well what it is that you're downloading and from where. Therefore when initially you'll see speeds soaring to 125 kbps, it will eventually come down to 25 kbps, and you'll be wondering what happened. Well your ISP happened. He just throttled your connection.  

Most BitTorrent clients offer an encoding option to ‘mask' the data that you send and receive via the torrent in order to let you get away with high speed at the cost of your ISP's bandwidth. However, ISP's have become smarter and these tricks don't seem to work anymore. Therefore proxy servers come to your aid. You will find quite a few torrent clients that act as proxy servers themselves. These pass their IP address as yours, so it actually seems like they're downloading and not you and thus your speed stays pretty good. Then there are third party proxy servers which you could use for downloading torrents. These work in the same way that browsing proxies work.  

You could go in for the torrent client-cum-proxy server, but there's a very good chance you might have to download a program onto your comp, and if you're not sure then you really shouldn't go ahead with it. Third party proxy servers, on the other hand seem pretty safe. You could try out a few and then stick with what you think is the best.