Proxies upstream servers??

[arran]

what are upstream servers?

I Have heard that a proxies upstream server can reveal your traffic and IP address is this true?

[SteveTX]

for most vpn and proxy services, yes. That is because they are 1-hop services. The reason is that they provide privacy against the target website you visit, not anonymity.

With a machine running at a datacenter, the uplink host (datacenter/ISP/Internet Exchange/etc) can see all the connections coming into and going out of the box. If it is a 1-hop proxy, that means they can see the source and destination of each connection. They can see who you are, they can see what website your are going to, regardless of encryption.

To defeat that issue, you need an international multi-hop proxy network. Multi-hop so that the entry/exit traffic/IPs aren't known to a single provider, International so that it isn't all on the same carrier/IX/datacenter/jurisdiction. If you want to resist collusion/correlation by datacenters/data spies, the connection between the multi-hop proxy nodes must be multiplexed and crowding-optimized.