How to Hide Your IP Address: VPN, Proxy, and Tor Compared

Your IP address reveals information about you: your approximate geographic location (typically accurate to the city level), your ISP, and your connection type. While it doesn't directly reveal your name or exact address, it can be used to:

• Track your online activity across different websites and services.
• Target you geographically with content restrictions, pricing differences, or censorship.
• Profile your network and identify your ISP and connection characteristics.
• Associate your sessions across different browsing sessions and services.

You can check what information your IP reveals right now using LookMyIP. Whether you want more privacy, need to access geo-restricted content, or want to protect yourself on public Wi-Fi, there are several methods to mask your real IP address.

A VPN encrypts all your internet traffic and routes it through a server in a location of your choice. Websites see the VPN server's IP address instead of yours.

How it works: VPN software on your device creates an encrypted tunnel to the VPN provider's server. All your traffic passes through this tunnel. The VPN server then forwards your requests to the internet using its own IP address.

Pros:

• Encrypts all traffic from your device (not just browser traffic)
• Wide selection of server locations worldwide
• Easy to use — most providers have one-click apps
• Good speeds with reputable providers
• Protects you on public Wi-Fi

Cons:

• Requires trusting the VPN provider with your traffic
• Costs money for reliable services (typically $3–12/month)
• Some services detect and block VPN IP addresses
• Can slow down your connection slightly
• A VPN does not make you truly anonymous — your VPN provider can still see your activity

Best for: General privacy, accessing geo-restricted content, protecting traffic on public Wi-Fi, bypassing ISP throttling.

A proxy server acts as an intermediary between your device and the internet. Your requests go to the proxy, which forwards them to the destination using its own IP.

Types of proxies:

• HTTP proxies: Handle web traffic only. The destination sees the proxy's IP.
• SOCKS proxies: More versatile — handle any type of traffic. SOCKS5 supports authentication and UDP.
• Transparent proxies: Forward your requests but include your real IP in headers. Not useful for privacy.
• Residential proxies: Use IP addresses assigned to real residential ISPs, making them harder to detect as proxies.

Pros:

• Can be faster than VPNs (no encryption overhead for HTTP proxies)
• Many free options available
• Good for simple geo-spoofing

Cons:

• Most proxies do NOT encrypt your traffic (except HTTPS proxy connections)
• Only covers specific applications (usually just the browser)
• Free proxies are often unreliable, slow, or malicious
• Easier to detect and block than VPNs
• The proxy operator can see and modify your unencrypted traffic

Best for: Quick, application-specific IP masking when encryption isn't needed. Web scraping and automated tasks.

Tor routes your traffic through three random volunteer-operated servers (nodes) around the world, encrypting it at each step. No single node knows both your identity and your destination.

How it works: Your traffic is encrypted in three layers. Each relay removes one layer of encryption and forwards the traffic to the next relay. The entry node knows your IP but not your destination. The exit node knows your destination but not your IP. The middle node knows neither.

Pros:

• Strongest anonymity of all three options
• Free and open source
• Decentralized — no single organization controls it
• No need to trust a single provider

Cons:

• Significantly slower than VPNs or proxies (traffic passes through three relays)
• Exit node can see unencrypted traffic
• Many websites block Tor exit nodes
• Not suitable for high-bandwidth activities (streaming, downloads)
• Using Tor may attract attention from your ISP or network administrator
• Only protects traffic through the Tor Browser (not other applications, by default)

Best for: Situations requiring strong anonymity, accessing censored content, whistleblowing, journalism in restrictive environments.

The bottom line: For most people, a reputable VPN provides the best balance of privacy, speed, and convenience. Use Tor when anonymity is critical. Avoid free proxies for anything involving sensitive data.

No matter which method you use, check that your IP is actually hidden by visiting LookMyIP — it will show you the IP address that websites see when you connect.

This is the part most guides skip, and it is the part that matters. Changing your IP address hides one identifier. It does not make you anonymous, and treating it as though it does leads people to take risks they would not otherwise take.

Browser fingerprinting still identifies you. Your user agent, screen resolution, timezone, installed fonts, language settings, canvas and WebGL rendering characteristics, and audio stack together form a signature that is frequently unique across millions of users. None of it travels over your IP address. A VPN changes your apparent location while your fingerprint stays identical, which in some cases makes you *more* identifiable rather than less — you become the only user with that exact fingerprint appearing from a Romanian data centre.

Cookies and logins are unaffected. Signing into an account attaches everything you do to that account. Logging into Google over a VPN tells Google exactly who you are, and the IP address becomes irrelevant.

DNS queries can leak outside the tunnel. If your system resolver is still using your ISP's DNS servers while your traffic goes through a VPN, your ISP sees every domain you visit even though it cannot see the content. This is a configuration failure, not a theoretical risk, and it is common.

WebRTC can expose your real address. Browsers use WebRTC for voice and video, and its ICE candidate gathering queries local network interfaces directly, bypassing the proxy layer. A site running three lines of JavaScript can read the result. Test yours with the IP privacy and leak test.

Your VPN provider sees everything your ISP would have. You have not removed the observer; you have changed which company it is, and you have chosen one that is often incorporated somewhere with weaker consumer protection than your ISP.

Hiding your IP is a useful tool for specific purposes: avoiding location-based price discrimination, accessing your home network's region while travelling, keeping your home address off the logs of sites you do not trust, and adding a layer between you and network-level observation on public Wi-Fi. It is not a solution to surveillance by services you log into.

VPN reviews are one of the most heavily monetised affiliate categories on the internet, and most "top 10" lists are ranked by commission rate. A few criteria are worth applying independently.

Audited no-logs claims, not asserted ones. Every provider claims no logs. What distinguishes them is an independent audit by a named firm, published in full, and repeated — not a one-off marketing exercise from four years ago. Better still is a provider that has had a no-logs claim tested in court or by a seizure and survived it.

Jurisdiction, with realistic expectations. Providers advertise being outside the Fourteen Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangement. This matters less than it is made to sound: what actually protects you is not holding the data in the first place. A provider in Panama that keeps logs is worse than one in Switzerland that does not.

RAM-only infrastructure. Servers that run from volatile memory and hold no persistent disk cannot surrender historical data if seized, because there is none. This is a meaningful technical control rather than a policy promise.

Ownership transparency. A striking number of consumer VPN brands are owned by a small number of parent companies, some of which also own the review sites recommending them. Check who actually owns the product.

Protocol support. WireGuard is faster and has a far smaller codebase than OpenVPN, which makes it easier to audit. OpenVPN remains more mature and more configurable. Avoid anything offering only PPTP, which has been cryptographically broken since 2012.

Free VPNs. Running VPN infrastructure costs money. If you are not paying, the revenue comes from somewhere — historically from injecting advertising, selling browsing data, or, in the documented case of Hola, reselling users' bandwidth as a residential proxy network. A trustworthy free tier exists (Proton VPN's is the usual example) but it is the exception.

Verify any provider actually works before trusting it: connect, then check your apparent address with the IP lookup tool and run the leak test. A VPN that leaks DNS is providing a false sense of security, which is worse than none.

Most VPN failures are configuration problems with known fixes.

Enable the kill switch. Without one, any momentary drop in the tunnel sends your traffic over the normal route with your real address, usually without any visible indication. Every reputable client has this; it is often off by default.

Disable WebRTC if you do not need it. In Firefox, set media.peerconnection.enabled to false in about:config. Chrome offers no built-in switch, so use an extension such as WebRTC Network Limiter, or accept the exposure. Note that disabling it breaks browser-based video calls.

Force DNS through the tunnel. Confirm which resolver you are actually using:

nslookup -type=txt o-o.myaddr.l.google.com ns1.google.com

The address returned should belong to your VPN provider, not your ISP. If it does not, enable the client's DNS leak protection or set the resolver manually.

Watch for IPv6 leaks. Many VPNs tunnel IPv4 only. If your ISP provides IPv6 and the VPN does not carry it, IPv6-capable sites will see your real address while IPv4 sites see the VPN. Either choose a provider with full IPv6 support or disable IPv6 on the interface while connected.

Do not mix Tor with a VPN casually. The combinations have genuinely different threat models and the popular advice is often wrong. Tor over VPN hides Tor use from your ISP but places the VPN provider in a position to correlate. VPN over Tor breaks Tor's anonymity guarantees in most configurations. For most people, using the Tor Browser alone as designed is the correct choice.

Finally, whatever you configure, re-test after every client update. Providers change defaults, and a leak that appeared after an update is far more common than one present from the start.

Does incognito mode hide my IP address?

No. Private browsing prevents your browser from storing history, cookies and form data locally. Every website, your ISP, your employer and your network operator see exactly what they would otherwise. It protects you from other people using your computer, and from nothing else.

Will a VPN make my internet faster or slower?

Usually slower, because traffic takes a longer path and is encrypted and decrypted at both ends. Expect a 5–20% throughput reduction with WireGuard to a nearby server, more to a distant one. The exception is when your ISP is actively throttling a specific service — encryption hides which service it is, so throttling cannot be applied.

Can my ISP still see what I do with a VPN?

They see that you are connected to a VPN, the volume of traffic, and the timing. They cannot see the destinations or content, provided DNS is not leaking. Traffic-analysis techniques can infer some information from packet timing and size patterns, but this is not something ISPs do routinely.

Is Tor safe to use?

Tor itself is sound and is used daily by journalists, activists and researchers. The risks are at the edges: a malicious exit node can read unencrypted traffic, so use HTTPS throughout. Downloading files and opening them outside Tor can reveal your address. And in some countries, connecting to Tor at all draws attention — bridges exist specifically to address that.

Does a VPN protect me on public Wi-Fi?

Yes, and this is one of its strongest genuine use cases. It prevents other users on the network and the network operator from observing your traffic or interfering with it. Note that HTTPS already protects the content of most traffic; the VPN adds protection for metadata and for anything not using TLS.