Just like all houses come with addresses, all devices come with IP addresses. These IP addresses are unique strings of numbers that help identify individual devices among a pool of them in a network.
This helps perhaps look for a specific device to Bluetooth your pictures to or find your printer on your computer easily so you can print out your assignment pages. However, there is a darker side to IP addresses. Because these lead directly to the machine, hackers often use IP addresses to track down a particular device to hack it.
Another downside is that advertising companies use IP addresses to track online behaviors to use the data to fuel their marketing campaigns. This works great for boosting the profits of companies and agencies but is manipulative and exploitative.
These are two of many reasons that more and more people are looking to hide their IP addresses to boost security and privacy around their online activities. No visible IP addresses mean that third parties won’t be able to track you, giving your online privacy back into your own hands.
If you’ve been on the hunt for ways to hide your IP address too, you’re at the right place. In this blog, we’ll discuss some ways to make sure that your IP addresses stays hidden and you can benefit from increased online security. Let’s look into these ways one by one.
Use a Canada VPN—the easiest and most secure way
Hands down, using a Canada VPN service is the best way to ensure that your IP address stays hidden. A VPN is essentially a cybersecurity tool that indirectly lets users connect to the internet through a remote and secure server.
When you connect through a VPN, your total online traffic is routed through a proxy server in a whole other country. This process also hides your original IP address and replaces it temporarily with the IP address of your server.
Not only does a VPN help make sure that you’re anonymous online and that your browsing is fully private, but it also has loads of other benefits. Some of these include letting you download and stream torrents safely and smoothly and boosting your internet speed by allowing you to bypass ISP throttling.
Furthermore, VPNs also let you bypass geo-barriers, letting you unblock content, websites, and webpages from all around the world.
Use the Tor browser—safe, but can easily rank as the slowest method
Tor browser is another popular way to hide your IP address and protect your online privacy. Security junkies and people who don’t like sharing their data with advertising companies worldwide regularly use the Tor browser to log on to the internet.
For those of you who don’t know what Tor browser is, it is a free and open-source browser, just like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, that you can use to get on the internet. The only difference is that Tor was created to let you surf online without giving away personal information like your IP address.
This is also why many people use Tor to surf the dark web, buy-in cryptocurrency, and carry out private conversations. With its multi-layered security and high-level encryption protocols, there is a far lesser chance of any of it being traced back to you.
Use a Proxy server—Probably the riskiest method
Another way to hide your IP address is to use a proxy server. Also popular is open proxy; these are used to re-route your browsers around certain content filters. Educational institutions like schools and colleges use these to block certain websites, as well as companies.
Even though proxies are effective, there are certain risks involved in using free ones. One of the most prominent downsides is the slow down of your internet connection as they are mostly run on compromised machines—even making them illegal in some countries.
Public Wi-Fi—a highly insecure method
Every time your network changes, your IP address changes too. So, if you want to hide your original IP address without anyone tracing it back to you, you could always use a public Wi-Fi connection.
Even though this works, it could put you at a greater risk of a security breach instead of protecting you from one. This is because public Wi-Fis are highly insecure and can be hang-out hubs for hackers and other cyber attackers, who can then get into connected devices and extract sensitive information.
Ask your ISP to change your IP address—the long route
Your Internet Service Provider, or your ISP, is the entity that gets to decide your network IP address, and you can always get it changed through them. They might ask you to verify your account information or file in an application with additional charges, but overall, it isn’t too hard to get your ISP to change your IP address.