EmpowerShop Pro-life

Inter­net Users Face Unseen Dan­gers by not Hid­ing their IP Address

By: Tino Bruno

Many Inter­net users fail to real­ize the impor­tance of hid­ing their IP address to main­tain Inter­net pri­vacy. Web surfers may know to main­tain anonymity with a proxy server, but it is impor­tant for every­one to know the many rea­sons why an IP address should be masked and hid­den while surf­ing. An Inter­net Pro­to­col address is a numer­i­cal iden­ti­fi­ca­tion num­ber given to devices in a com­puter net­work. Each device must know its own IP address and the IP address of the device with which it needs to com­mu­ni­cate. Every per­son, com­pany, device, or server that is online at has an IP address, which is sim­i­lar to person’s home address. Some­one must have your home address to send you a let­ter; much like a device must have your IP address to relay a packet of infor­ma­tion. IP addresses hold a vast amount of infor­ma­tion and know­ing how to con­trol the amount of infor­ma­tion a web­site or com­pany can gain on each user is up to the user.

An IP address main­tains a record of geo­graphic infor­ma­tion based on where the user is surf­ing from. Many web­sites are read­ily avail­able that allows a user to find his or her own IP address. Not only will these web­sites eas­ily show a user’s IP address, but also what city, state, and coun­try they are surf­ing from and the ISP they are using. A web­site will not be able to track a user down to their home address based on their IP, but in most cases it can get within a few miles with great accu­racy, depend­ing on the clos­est net­work hub. A sub­poe­naed ISP or a com­pany check­ing their web logs on the other hand can eas­ily locate the user’s home or cubi­cle. Some of the bet­ter web­sites will also give the user’s area code, geo­graphic lon­gi­tude and lat­i­tude, whether a proxy is being used, and the type of Inter­net con­nec­tion (cable, dsl, etc.) a user has.

Users surf­ing from work can ben­e­fit from mask­ing their IP address. When con­nect­ing from work, the IP address is gen­er­ated from the company’s Inter­net server, which gives all the same infor­ma­tion pre­vi­ously stated. This infor­ma­tion is not directly tracked to a spe­cific user, but to the com­pany itself. If an employee is research­ing the com­pe­ti­tion, the com­peti­tor will see the IP address of the com­pany and could send them to a “dummy” site with false infor­ma­tion. Another rea­son an employee may want to hide their IP at work is to avoid break­ing com­pany guide­lines by surf­ing for per­sonal rea­sons. If an employee masks his or her IP while surf­ing it will not be tracked back to the com­pany. A good proxy server will also hide the ori­gin site (the site the user just came from) with a fake domain so that the com­pany web logs will not show the real sites the employee was surfing.

Aside from work pur­poses, web surfers have many per­sonal rea­sons to hide their IP. Search engines, mar­ket­ing com­pa­nies, and even their own Inter­net Ser­vice Provider track and record their data. Mask­ing the IP address with an anony­mous proxy is a great way to avoid being mon­i­tored by these com­pa­nies. They asso­ciate the stored data with the “fake” IP address, leav­ing the user’s real IP address free from hav­ing been recorded or spammed. Users may also find that their IP address is blocked from access­ing cer­tain con­tent or web­sites. This can be due to guide­line vio­la­tions, band­width lim­its, or the web­site block­ing IPs/only allow­ing IPs from cer­tain places. Surf­ing with an anony­mous proxy will allow surfers to use a fresh IP address when­ever they encounter one of these restric­tions, or to avoid hav­ing their surf­ing habits tracked and recorded. (more…)