Reclaim Your Digital Life

IP addresses can be very very complicated. Luckily, most of the compexisty doesn’t matter for our purposes. Therfore, if you don’t undersatnd the next paragraph, don’t wory about it, just move onto the paragraph after.

Most computers using IPv4 have two IP addrsses. One is an internal IP address (it’s IP address on the LAN, or Local Area Network) and an External IP address (it’s IP address on the WAN, or wide area network). Some of your the IP address says “I belong to this particular network” while the rest of the IP address uniquely identifies the specific computer. How much of it describing the network and how much of it is uniquely identifing the computer is specified by the subnet mask. If you don’t understand you can either read this page and then return, or simply move on – you don’t need this knowlage for the next paragarph.

This is the important stuff:

1.) All the computers on a single network share the same external IP address AND

2.) This external IP address is given to your network by your internet service provider AND

3.) It is unique to your local network, AND

4.) The devices on your network share it with every single website you visit

Think about what this means!!! Imagine if I run a website that sells pizza, and I also run a website that hosts photographs. Last month you baught pizza from my website and I stored your IP address in case you come back. Today you visit my website that hosts photos. You think these two things are unrelated, BUT because I host both websites I know that it is you, the same person who baught pizza and when you baught pizza you gave me your name, credit card and delivery address. Now that you are on my photo website, I know exactly who you are.

And it gets much worse: In the example above, I said I was the owner of both websites. But it isn’t only the primary owner of the website who can see your IP address, it is also the owner of other code on that website. Some organisations have code on MILLIONS of website, and they can track your IP address almost everywhere it goes. I am talking about the code which displays things that you see very frequently on websites, such as facebook buttons, twitter buttons, or the code which emebds youtube videos etc etc. This is the reason why some browsers (such as Brave browser) has the option to disable this kind of code and stop it from being allowed to run.

And there is another bad thing too: your internet service provider knows every website you ever visit (to domain name level). In Australia they are required to keep this information ________link to details.

So now that you know how your IP address can be used to track you, we can move onto how to hide your IP address. There is basicly two options, and they both have pro’s and cons. But they both a.) Hide your IP address from websites that you visit and b.) Hide websites you visit from your internet service provider.

Option 1: Use a VPN

I am non-expert and that is why I give this simple non-expert explination of how it works: Your internet service provider connects you to your VPN provider (and therfore your ISP knows that you are connecting to a VPN). But once you are connected to a VPN your real IP address is kind of like the “internal IP address” (ie it is internal to the VPN) and the VPN’s external IP address is what websites see when you visit them.

The net effect is this:

Websites do not get to see your IP address (because they see the external IP address of your VPN provider instead)

Your ISP does not know which websites you visited (because all it knows is that it connected you to a VPN)

However your VPN provider knows everything. It knows exactly what websites you visited.

So while you can no longer be tracked by IP address, and you your ISP can no longer spy on the websites you visit, you are placing ultimate trust in your VPN provider. Therfore choosing a VPN provider you trust is very important.

I am not going to review VPN providers (plenty of others have) but the one I use is ExpressVPN (note: this is an affilate link that will give you a free month and also help this website). I don’t like everything about it (it is not open source) but it is the best I have found. It is fast, it claims to not store any logs. I also really like it’s “threat manager” feature and…while it’s not often I say this about a product, I like that it costs money. I would never trust a free VPN provider. Remember, if a service appears to be free you are probably the product.

The way you run the VPN is also important. Most VPN providers limit the number of connections you can make. This means that you can only connect a limited number of devices at one time. This is annoying and limiting. A better way is to run the VPN software on your router. This way everything on your network will be protected by the VPN and your VPN provider will see it as only 1 connection. It also means you don’t have to run any VPN software on your devices.

The easiest way to acheive this is to simply buy a router already flashed with software that can connect to your chosen VPN provider, such as this one. Another option is to see if your existing router can be flashed with such software, and you might be able to acheive that here (assuming you have chosen ExpressVPN). Although a tiny bit more complicated, I have chosen to buy a routher from FlashRouters with ordinary DD-WRT plus the Flash Routers PrivacyApp and just connect to ExpressVPN with it. It works great, and has a few more features than the dedicated ExpressVPN firmware.

Option 2: Use Torr

I don’t want to butcher any explination of how Torr works. Go to the torr website and get a higher quality explination. But in summary, the Tor network is another way to keep your IP address secret from the website you are visiting. However, while I said above that you must trust your VPN provider, this is much less true of the Tor network. When using Tor, there is noone you really need to trust (within reasoan, and with caviats). For detail please look elsware, but in summary this is because when you use the torr network your data is sent to it’s destination via 3 nodes. Each node adds an additional layer of encryption. Only the first node really knows where the data came from (but doens’t know where it is going). Only the last node really knows where it is going (but doesn’t know where it came from). None of the nodes can read the data.

You can in fact configure any browser (or any software) to use the Torr network. But the easiest way to use the Torr network for web browsing is to install the Torr browser. The Torr browser has other privacy benifits too, such as fingerprint protection. Again, it is is the ultimate private browser. But for more, see the “browser fingerprinting” post (as this post is only about hiding IP address but I have done another post about browser tracking).

Torr is better than VPN because it is a.) free b.) doesn’t requires you to put trust in a VPN provider. But for me, Torr it’s just too slow.

As said above, all the data that leaves my house goes via ExpressVPN because my router maintains a connection to ExpressVPN. But I would never have all the data leaving my house to go via Torr because it is just too slow for daily use. Similarly, I could never use Torr as my daily browser for the same reason (just too slow).

For those of you who plan to move to Qubes operating system, it has the Tor Browser pre-installed within a Whonix VPN. If you don’t know what this means, don’t worry too much. If you really want to, click here.

Bottom Line:

Torr is the ultimate private network and is the only easy option that doesn’t require you to place trust in anyone. But if you can place trust in a VPN provider, this is a faster and more convneient option which still hides your IP address and keeps your browsing history private from you ISP.