4 Ways to Hide Your IP Address
There are plenty of reasons that you should hide your IP address regularly. These reasons range from your ISP keeping track of the different websites you visit and the data that your computer is downloading all the way to the government in your area keeping their eyes perhaps a little too centered on what you are doing. The bottom line is your IP address is something that should not be out in the open. Besides your ISP and the government, hackers also use your IP address in order to gain access to your computer and plant malware and other problems. The bottom line, if your IP address is hidden, then you have less security problems to worry about.
There are plenty of reasons and methods that you can use to hide your IP address. There are also lots of questions. For example, some people may want to know about hiding their IP address on public networks. Others may be asking exactly what is a VPN service? Once you start talking about encryption and firewalls, now things have definitely taken a turn towards being way more unknown and hidden.
That said, make sure you use these tricks to keep your IP address hidden. This keeps your geographic location unavailable, stops web tracking, keeps your digital footprint fairly invisible, and bypasses filters, bans, and blacklists. Having your IP address hidden will keep you safe and allow you to browse the web from anywhere without fear.
Get a VPN – The Best Solution
The VPN is by far the best solution because it does so much to keep your IP address private. The way a VPN works is a process called tunneling. When you connect to a VPN server, your data is encrypted. So, all your ISP will see is a chain of unintelligible letters and numbers. This data will be useless to your ISP and at the same time, the websites that you are going to will not read your IP address that your ISP provides, but they will read the IP address provided by the VPN server that you connect to.
The way this works is actually quite simple. The way you connect to your ISP is what assigns you the IP address. Essentially, you connect to the VPN server the way you connect with your ISP. Then what happens is the VPN server basically gives you a mask – a fake IP address – and every site that you access is sharing data with the fake IP address. All of this data is given to your ISP is just this messy hash of unintelligible letters and numbers. Meanwhile, you are protected via the VPN tunnel, your movements are not being logged, and essentially the bad actors can’t see your network and penetrate your network via your actual IP address. The VPN makes the most sense because it offers the most protection for people like you who are looking to use the internet but not deal with all the problems associated with it.
The Tor Browser
Like all web browsers, Tor does the job of getting you onto the sites you want to see with minimal fuss and problems. This browser is every bit as good as any other browser because you can shop on Amazon without a problem and you can also do things online that you do with other browsers. However, with Tor there is a difference. This browser provides you cover for your IP address, and the way it does it is with encryption like what was described when talking about the VPN. This encryption gives anyone looking at the activity of the browser a whole bunch of random numbers that makes no sense, which makes your computer a hard target, and something hackers want nothing to do with.
The way Tor works is that you will go ahead and download the browser onto your computer. Once the browser is installed, the next step for it is to conceal your identity. This is a free service, which is great. And each time you go online with Tor, your IP address is concealed, but so if your activity. There is just one drawback with Tor, however, and that drawback is that Tor is a slow browser compared to others. This is unfortunate because there are so many good things offered by Tor, but if you are not able to get your site to load quickly, then the benefits of Tor are not practical.
Go with a Proxy Server
The proxy server is a famous way to try to get around IP addresses by essentially creating your own server. This seems like a really good idea except it is not the easiest idea to get done and there are several things that can go awry. The first is while your browser should work, it is not exactly reliable and can slow down especially as the proxy server works to get around the filters set out by an employer or a school.
The slowness of the connection is a problem, along with possibly not having the technical know how to get the job done correctly. Other countries may just flat out ban the practice, which makes the job that much harder when building a proxy server as well. Essentially a VPN does the same thing as a proxy server without all the complications embedded within it.
Use Free or Public WiFi
Admittedly, this is probably the least safe option but you should be aware that your IP address does not stick with you. If you leave your home and connect at the library, you will have a different IP address because you are using their network while you are doing all your business online.
If you are unsure of what your IP address is, then all you need to do is visit a site that tells you IP addresses and that will help you see exactly what it is.
That said, public networks are not safe at all, so you should really be using a VPN when connecting to them.
