Whether you’re an ex-UK resident who has moved to another country only to find that some of the content you’ve come to know and love – BBC iPlayer for example – is no longer available to you, ExpatShield could be the tool for you. This is a free proxy tool that can be used to assign yourself a UK IP address so you can get around country restrictions and access sites that would otherwise be blocked.

There is another helpful side-effect to working with a proxy in this way; it helps to improve your security and privacy. As you are working with a proxy that assigns you a temporary IP address based in another country, you are, to all intents and purposes, anonymous.

While the software is available free of charge, it is supported by advertising. While this is not a major problem, it is something to keep in mind as there are alternative proxy tools out there that are not supported in this way. The advertising is not too overwhelming, and ads can be closed after a while so you are not forced to endure them the whole time you are online.

Something else worth noting is the fact that the program cannot currently be used with Windows 8. Versions of Microsoft’s operating system up to 7 work perfectly, but if you have upgraded to 8, you’re going to have to look elsewhere.