Do I need to Hide My IP Address?

Exactly why do people really want to hide their IP address online, well it’s probably given that they value their privacy and want to keep their browsing safe if they’re using the internet.  It can also be used to avoid censorship and  internet filtering that happens in many countries across the world.

You’ll find plenty of reasons that people like to hide their IP address when using the internet.  While you are surfing the net, sending emails or just chatting with some online friends, the IP address of your computer is your identity online.  It is primarily the IP address that could be linked to you as an individual, your ISP holds information in their logs of all things you do online, it’s all in a their logs and always connected to your own IP address.

While you visit a internet site, almost any web site then your IP address is recorded in their logs.  This is actually major reason people often use anonymous proxies, by directing your surfing via the proxy – the IP address of the server is logged instead of your PC.   Thus giving some sort of anonymity and protection against logging for the websites you visit.

As expected it is rarely that simple, the possible downside is that the proxy server you utilize has logs which record your web browsing.  The commercial and highly secure proxy services delete these logs almost instantly, but who knows what happens to the logs on free anonymous proxies. It is important you exercise extreme caution whenever using a free proxy service, many are legitimate but an awful lot of them are run by hackers and identity thieves.

For folks who hide their IP address for privacy reasons, they’re just in fact missing the idea really.  A decent anonymous proxy does obscure your Ip address from the internet site you visit, but it does not even attempt to protect your identity from your logs at your ISP.  They are the real security risk, the ISP has the potential to form exact lists of absolutely everything you do online.  That is why Governments utilize this information when investigating crimes, why go round the individual web pages when everything required is in one place.
There are several initiatives now to allow easy access to these logs, ISPs in Europe have to keep them for at least two years.  A Directive has ensured this is mandatory and there are very similar initiatives in the us alone, other countries don’t bother with the legalities and access them whenever they want.

For example if a company is investigating copyright infringement any ISP can readily produce an inventory of P2P users, or everyone who has downloaded a particular file.  The worrying bit is the fact that this information is easily accessible, in north america you’ll need a warrant to gain access to your home PC, however, you don’t to seize a full copy of your Internet activities for the last couple of years directly from your ISP.

Read much more about methods to use anonymous proxies to really protect your identity online around this blog -all about  Internet privacy and security issues, anonymous surfing here.