I have heard of Tor being a way to keep your privacy while being online. It disguises any REAL details about yourself [eg IP address] by bouncing the requests around many Tor servers in a way that blocks tracing by anyone. I am not sure of the difference in using Tor compared to a public Proxy though.
To use Tor with your browser of choice you also need your own Proxy to route requests through Tor. I found this site to be of great benefit in setting up Tor to work with Privoxy
http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/howto-anonymous-communication-with-tor-some-hints-and-some-pitfalls
Not sure how much this will slow down browsing. I am about to find out though .......