This article is about reasons to hide IP address while traveling. Your IP address is an important piece of information that is exchanged with every interaction between your networked devices. Like your current residence address, an IP address helps identify devices connected to the Internet, including your computer, smartphone, and server.
Everything collects your IP address to work, from the website you visit or the streaming service you use. Although it is important to have one, should you reveal you’re real IP address? Is there a reason to hide it? Let’s dig deeper and find out. You can learn the reason in more depth by clicking here.
What is an IP Address?
When connected to the Internet, your device is assigned an IP address – a string of numbers and a decimal number that identifies your device and your location (country, city, and zip code details). If you connect to the Internet from multiple locations, your IP address changes accordingly.
Your public IP address is unique and visible to everyone on the Internet. You can find your IP address by searching on Google for “my IP address”. When traveling, there are a lot of details to worry about, from making sure you have the correct documents to staying safe. It can be easy to overlook some of the less obvious points.
However, one thing to always keep in mind as a digital nomad is the importance of protecting your online privacy, especially if you’re connected to a lot of public Wi-Fi while you’re traveling. Your IP address can be used to track your location. Hide your IP if you are traveling and do not want others to see your activities.
Prevent Others from Tracking You
Note that not everyone needs to hide their IP addresses, but if you think some of the reasons below warrant use for you, you can try! No matter what website you load on, everyone tracks or collects your IP address in some way or another.
In many cases, websites do not collect your data directly, but some of the services they use may collect your IP address.
For a modern website with multiple functions, there are many tracking tools that are implemented to help them analyze their visitors. Of course, this is not the process of collecting and selling your data to third parties. It can help them to improve the user experience on their site by referencing statistics.
But, if you don’t want your IP address to be revealed by a website, you have to hide it. Technically, you’ll need some privacy-focused browser extensions, private browsers, and other tools to minimize tracking. But hiding your IP address is an easy way to increase your privacy.
As a result, when you hide your IP address, you will not provide websites with your country or location.
Unlock Access to Content
Many web services implement geo-blocking that limits IP addresses to a list of countries. In their defense, it saves those resources and bandwidth. However, if you still want to access the restricted content, you can hide your IP address and use a fake IP address to bypass the ban.
Anyway, if you’re traveling abroad but still want to access geo-blocked content, this should come in handy – like the various Netflix series.
Prevent Digital Marketers from Profiling You
It’s worth noting that hiding your IP address will not prevent marketers from tracking you. Many methods include email tracking, short links, surveys, and advertising to help digital marketers know what they like/dislike.
However, hiding your IP address makes it difficult to create a complete profile of your preferences. If you do not use a fake IP address, they can easily combine all the data associated with your IP address, improving your demographic statistics.
Go Full Incognito
Private browsing or incognito mode in your browser helps you surf the web without worrying about clearing cookies, history, and basic tracking.
However, you still provide your IP address if you don’t mask it. In other words, your browsing activity isn’t really private, and your IP address is tied to your incognito activity.
Prevent Location Tracking
Whether you prevent apps from using your location information or disable them in your operating system, your IP address provides your approximate location.
The location may not be completely accurate, but it is close enough in many cases. So, if you want to keep your location private, use a fake IP address while hiding the real location.
Prevent Your Internet Service Provider
If you do not take a specific action, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) will track your web browsing activity. Of course, not all providers will spy on you. But if you don’t trust your ISP, it’s always better to hide your browsing activity from them.
Although you can find DNS-over-HTTPS support to improve privacy, many IP masking technologies (such as VPNs) must be supported as well.
Prevent Search Engine Tracking
As long as you stick to a few private search engine options, Google, Bing, and many others typically collect your IP address to associate your search and activity data with it. They may also show personalized ads based on your IP address.
So, if you want a private browsing experience and don’t want to see personalized results or ads, hiding your IP address is a great solution.
Final Words
By hiding your IP address, you can make it more difficult for others to track your online activity and find out your personal information.
There may be times when you don’t even need to hide your real IP address. Let’s say you want to access a login web page that is restricted to a fixed IP or IP range. Unless you have a use case like this, you may want to consider hiding your IP address.
