When someone wants to hide their IP they usually have a very good reason. But still there are many individuals out there that don't quite know how, and that's why we're going to tell you how to hide your IP. The first question you're going to need to ask yourself, is why would you want to hide your IP. Once you figure that out, then you can go on to how to hide your IP. You might not think it actually matters, but the WHY part of it is very important.
The idea behind hiding your IP is to not allow people to know that it's you. You might be participating in a chatrooom and you don't want people to know exactly where you are from. An IP address can be a very forthcoming piece of information. Not only does it give your general location, if you have a website up, someone can go to a certain website and do a WHOIS on your URL, which will in turn reveal to that person your exact address. This can be a particular annoyance, especially if you are into protecting your own identity.
So someone finding your address might not be a terrible thing, admittedly. What can it actually lead to? Well picture someone finding your home address, then going through your garbage to find your credit card information. This can be rather irritating to say the least, so you definitely want to learn how to hide your IP. That's not to say that it will happen every single time, but it could happen enough of the time to make you a little overprotective of your personal information.
This also goes for if you are playing a video game, because there are those who will know a way to get your IP address through that. This leads into the question of why exactly you'd want to hide your IP. If you need to gain access to something that is only available to certain countries then you would want to get an IP address masker which replaces your IP with that of another country. If you just need to hide it in general, then you will want to get one that simply generates random IP addresses.
Unlike many people will tell you, no it is not illegal to mask your IP. As a matter of fact it is a great security precaution that you should take in order to keep things from being traced back to you. The actual act isn't illegal by any means, in the same way that owning a gun is not illegal. All that matters is what you do with it once it is in your possession.
Now that you have learned how to hide your IP, you should definitely look into the different pieces of software that are capable of doing this. There are actually quite a few to choose from, and they all have different functions. Find the one that's right for you and run with it!
Andy Green is a Web Developer and Internet Marketer with several years of experience in web security. You can check out Andy's review of
Hide My IP which shows you how to hide your IP.
