If you’re reading this, you’ve obviously decided that you’re not safe enough with your online signature and data flow exposed for everyone to see, and you’ve decided to take steps and protect yourself. Great idea! You’ve come to the right place, and we’ll be happy to help you and explain what methods can you use and recommend the best options.
First that you need to understand is the need to hide your IP address. It’s more than just a bunch of numbers, and the people who know how to read it can use it to figure out your exact location, and also who you are. Many of your online activities can be traced back to your IP, especially if you have a static address, that doesn’t change every time you connect online. Many people who aren’t especially skilled or interested in the internet processes either don’t know or don’t even care about this stuff, which puts them in danger.
To help you hide your private information and fix many online security issues, we’re prepared the top three methods that you can use:
Virtual Private Network (VPN)
VPNs are, without a doubt, the best thing when it comes to securing yourself. They are fast, they are secure, and there’s many of them to choose from.
They’re becoming increasingly popular, especially these days when online privacy is not a thing anymore. VPN providers own a great number of servers across the world, and when you connect to a VPN, it connects you to one of those servers to mask your IP. For example, if you use a US server, the internet will think you’re American when you’re actually from Europe or any other place in the world.
VPN can also hide your online activities, and this is done by data encryption. Upon activation, it creates a secure tunnel between your device and the internet and sends al of your data through it. This means that nobody can connect you with the things that you do online, nor can they be logged anywhere. The impact it has on your internet speed is minimal, and you probably won’t even notice it.
So, what VPN does is masking your true location, encrypting your data, and hiding you from hackers, your ISP and everyone else, it blocks malware and ads, and it doesn’t even log any of your online activity. So what’s the catch, you might ask? Well, this doesn’t come for free. But it’s not that expensive either, most of their services can be bought for $5 – $10 per month, which isn’t all that scary.
Since there are probably hundreds of VPN providers by now, we’ve decided to recommend a few that might suit your purposes:
- TorGuard
- IPVanish
- GhostVPN
- Private Internet Access (PIA)
Tor
If the VPNs are considered the best, then Tor is the second best thing you can use. It’s one of the most secure ways of hiding your IP and data, and it’s completely free. It sends your internet flow around the world, through over six thousand relays, which makes it impossible for anyone to track your activities back to you.
However, the downside is that this process takes a while, so it’s slow. Some of the newer users have also had some trouble when it comes to setting it up, and it’s not very good when it comes to downloading or streaming, but it’s completely fine for normal browsing.
So in short, it’s free, it will hide your IP, it will encrypt your data, and it will make your browsing session safe, but it won’t win any speed races anytime soon.
Proxy
Proxy is the third and last option we recommend, and it’s in this place for a reason. Proxies are a method of hiding your IP address. They’re free to use and simple to set up, but masking your IP is pretty much everything that they do. There’s no data encryption, no additional protection, nothing but the IP masking, and on top of that, they’re browser-based and can’t be used for other things, like torrenting.
The way it works is similar to VPN and Tor; your data is sent through a server between you and the internet. This server dislocates your IP, but the data remains open for viewing, there’s no encryption involved. You could use HTTPS to help with that problem, but the websites you’re on would have to support it for this to work. However, hackers always have their tricks, so in this case, they might bypass proxy’s methods and reveal your IP anyway.
Another bad thing about proxies is that they are pretty slow as well since they’re free and a lot of people use them. It’s not a great recommendation, but it does exist, and it can be used if there are no other options.
And that’s it; those are the three different ways that we recommend. The facts are obviously pointing towards VPNs since their services are the best, the safest, and you won’t have to worry about your internet speed. There is a price, but it’s not that high, and you’ll have complete anonymity and privacy while online.
