Privoxy is a free non-
caching
In computing, a cache ( ) is a hardware or software component that stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster; the data stored in a cache might be the result of an earlier computation or a copy of data stored elsewher ...
web proxy with filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy, manipulating cookies and modifying
web page data and
HTTP headers before the page is rendered by the browser. Privoxy is a "privacy enhancing proxy", filtering web pages and removing advertisements. Privoxy can be customized by users, for both stand-alone systems and multi-user networks. Privoxy can be chained to other proxies and is frequently used in combination with
Squid
True squid are molluscs with an elongated soft body, large eyes, eight arms, and two tentacles in the superorder Decapodiformes, though many other molluscs within the broader Neocoleoidea are also called squid despite not strictly fitting t ...
among others and can be used to bypass
Internet censorship.
History
Privoxy is based on the
Internet Junkbuster and is released under the
GNU General Public License. It runs on
Linux,
OpenWrt,
DD-WRT,
Windows,
macOS,
OS/2,
AmigaOS,
BeOS
BeOS is an operating system for personal computers first developed by Be Inc. in 1990. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware.
BeOS was positioned as a multimedia platform that could be used by a substantial population of desktop users a ...
, and most flavors of
Unix. Almost any Web browser can use it. The software is hosted at
SourceForge. Historically the Tor Project bundled Privoxy with
Tor but this was discontinued in 2010 as they pushed their own internal
Tor Browser project and recommended against external third party proxies. Privoxy still works if manually configured and is still recommended for third party non-browser applications which do not natively support
SOCKS.
Reception
Shashank Sharma of ''
Linux Format'' rated it 9/10 stars and wrote, "Privoxy is highly customisable, easy to set up, has good documentation and is fun to work with. Use it!" Erez Zukerman of ''
PC World'' rated it 4/5 stars and called it complicated but powerful. Michelle Delio of
Wired.com called it "an outstanding way to protect one's privacy".
See also
*
Content-control software
*
Web accelerator which discusses host-based HTTP acceleration
*
Proxy server which discusses client-side proxies
*
Reverse proxy which discusses origin-side proxies
*
Internet Cache Protocol
*
Polipo
Polipo is a lightweight caching and forwarding web proxy server. It has a wide variety of uses, from aiding security by filtering traffic; to caching web, DNS and other computer network lookups for a group of people sharing network resources; ...
, a caching web proxy server
*
Proxomitron
Proxomitron, the Universal Web Filter, is a filtering web proxy written by Scott R. Lemmon. This program was originally designed to run under Windows 95. All future development of the program was ceased in 2003 just one year before its author' ...
, a similar content-filtering proxy for Windows
References
External links
*
*
Internet privacy
Proxy servers
Free network-related software
Free software programmed in C
Cross-platform software
Forward proxy
Reverse proxy
Proxy server software for Linux
Unix network-related software
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