How to hide your IP address with a VPN
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Do you surf the internet? You will almost certainly be tracked, flagged down, or monitored by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), advertisers, or your government – if not by all three. how? And why might using a VPN help?
Blame it on your IP address. It locates your device and gives your online browsing activity away to anyone who knows that IP address.
With this information, ISPs and the government can target ads to you, prevent you from accessing external content, or put you under surveillance or censorship. As we say, there is a simple way to hide or disguise your IP address from prying eyes, and we’ll take you through that shortly. But first, let’s look at some of the basics.
What is an IP address?
Every device connected to the Internet has an Internet Protocol (IP) address assigned to it, which is a unique identification number used to connect your device to the Internet.
It is impossible to connect to the Internet without an IP address. When you search for “cats” on Google for example, your IP address points to the Google servers where the cat request came from, and where the search results should be sent to. Just as you have to share your home address with someone who sends you a letter through the postal service, you must also share your IP address with the person or website you wish to receive data from over the Internet. Otherwise, that data cannot be delivered.
Your IP address can also be used to determine your physical location. When you register with your Internet Service Provider, they assign you an IP address, which indicates the actual location from which you accessed the Internet. Your IP address can basically act as a “geolocation” for anyone who wants to know where you’re browsing from and what you’re browsing.
Why should I hide my IP address?
Just like with your home address, anyone with your IP address can determine your physical location. But other than your home address, people, companies, and governments can also track the things you search for and the sites you visit using your IP address, which can have far-reaching consequences for you.
companies: Companies stack their websites with cookies that track each time you visit their page and the buttons you click. This type of information is useful not only for a business that wants to personalize and personalize your experience on their site, but for external advertisers and marketers who want to target ads to you based on the searches you make. These ads are annoying to say the least, and they are only possible because organizations can track searches back to your IP address.
Companies can also block people from accessing content if they see that users reside in another country. Geo-blocking, as it’s called, is practiced by companies that, for example, don’t want people outside the US to access their websites. Watching Netflix and Amazon Prime are two of the biggest examples of this, where access to specific shows varies greatly from country to country.
Internet Service Providers: Your IP address has been registered with your ISP, which means that as a customer, your ISP knows all the personal information you gave them when you registered. As you use your ISP to access the Internet, your ISP also sees all of your Internet traffic, which, as of 2017, can be sold to third-party advertisers who will use this information to target ads to you.
ISPs are also obligated to keep these traffic logs if required by the country’s government. Countries such as the US, UK and Australia force ISPs to keep records of their customers’ browsing activity, ready for delivery without a court order if necessary.
Governments: Aside from requiring ISPs to keep logs of all browsing activities of their customers, some governments go to great lengths to monitor and monitor users within their own countries. Countries like China, which owns all the country’s ISPs, can block IP addresses en masse and prevent users from accessing content abroad (the most notable example of this that comes to mind is the country’s Great Firewall which blocks Google and WhatsApp in China entirely – Hence the popularity of VPNS use in China).
Government censorship and censorship in dozens of countries is now practiced to varying degrees behind the guise of national security, eroding the digital privacy of their citizens. On top of requiring ISPs to log all traffic on local servers, the formerly secret TEMPORA software in the UK tracks and stores all communication for up to 30 days for analysis, and since 2013, any customer wishing to sign up with an IP address will automatically be unauthorized. Able to access certain websites.
How do I hide my IP address?
While you must have an IP address to use the Internet, there are ways in which you can hide or disguise it. Proxies can be used to funnel your internet traffic through their own servers before sending it to the wider network, hiding your real IP address behind the proxy’s IP address. Your online activity is not hidden, allowing anyone to see what you’re doing online.
The safest and most secure option may be to use a Virtual Private Network (VPN). The best VPNs act as an encrypted tunnel around all the information sent from your device to your ISP server, masking not only your real IP address but all your online activities from ISPs, businesses and governments.
Since you are entrusting your traffic to a third party, it is crucial that you use a VPN service that will not only encrypt your internet traffic but will also do so without logging it. A free VPN provider can give you some privacy, but these services are often limited. Furthermore, you are putting yourself at risk of selling your information to third parties so that the provider can make a profit (they have to make money somehow).
The best chance to hide your IP address is to choose the best VPN that sticks to its promise to keep no logs. With a service as good as this, you can surf the internet without worrying about your IP address or your online activity being tracked or monitored by your ISP or the government.
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