Almost anywhere you go today on the Internet, you leave some sort of a trail behind. Whether it’s your online activities, location, or something else, unless you are very good at covering your tracks, it will be possible to find enough information about you.
One such trail is your Internet Protocol or IP address. Every computer, router, or another device on the network has an IP address assigned to them as an identifying number. The IP address itself is connected to the location, which is how we typically know if someone is using a laptop in the US or France for example.
But IP location can go even deeper than the country-level. Today, IP geolocation services are capable of very accurately pinpoint your location to the Zip code and according to the Transparency Report, the global IP geolocation market will reach $4.5 billion in value by 2027.
Depending on how you look at it, this can be a good or a bad thing. We are going to show you the various ways people use to hide their real IPs, why they do it, as well as why you need to detect them. Finally we will show you how IPInfo can help with that.
Why Do People Hide Their IP?
There are many reasons why people are hiding their IP addresses.
For instance, someone hiding their IP might be doing it to hide their identity from hackers trying to track their actions and reveal as little information about themselves as possible.
Or, they want to protect themselves from censoring governments who are spying on what they say and do online.
They might also want to prevent their Internet Service Providers (ISP) or search engines from keeping a log of their Internet browsing activities.
Some hide their IP to bypass geographically blocked content and websites or restrictions put up in their workplace or school.
Others want to be able to access video streaming services like Netflix or Hulu and watch the latest episodes of their favorite TV shows wherever they are.
People living in authoritarian countries like Iran, China, Russia, etc. hide their IPs to avoid state censorship and access blocked sites and content in their countries (hear the other side, so to speak).
On the other hand, that doesn’t mean that people in democratic countries like the US or UK are exempt from being spied upon by their governments. Anonymizing IP can also be useful for anyone living under the government with powerful electronic eavesdropping capabilities.
For instance, people in many western countries are under constant monitoring under 14EY. This is a coalition of countries, including United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Sweden and Norway that not only monitor their own citizens, but also trade information about the other members’ citizens back and forth with the rest of the “eyes”.
Whatever the reason, people will try to mask their IP address. If you have a website where it’s important for you to know exactly how they are doing that.
How Do People Hide Their IPs?
There are several ways to hide your real IP address. Here, we will focus on the three most widely used.
1. Using a VPN Software
An estimated worldwide VPN market value in 2019 was $23.6bn and it will be $27.1bn in 2020, according to Go-Globe’s The State of VPN Usage — Statistics and Trends. According to their figures, the worldwide VPN market grows by about 4 billion dollars every year.
A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, acts as a middleman between your computer and the destination server.
It serves two purposes. One is to encrypt your connection to the Internet. The other is to hide your real IP address.
To hide your IP address with a VPN all you need is to download a VPN of your choosing (such as NordVPN or ExpressVPN), log in to it and turn it on. Once on, the VPN should hide your IP and your location.
What happens here and the way that VPN hides your IP is that your traffic takes a slight detour through the VPN server. That way, your traffic reaches the websites you want to visit (like Netflix for example), not through your real IP, but the VPN’s IP.
2. With a Proxy Server
Another way to hide your IP address is to use a proxy server. In essence, what the proxy does is forward the client’s or network’s requests and receives and delivers server responses.
People often confuse proxy with VPN servers, believing them to do the same thing. This is not the case.
Proxy servers don’t encrypt the traffic, meaning that they won’t be able to hide your IP address from someone who intercepts traffic on the way from the device to the proxy server.
That’s why proxies tend to be less reliable than VPN servers when it comes to online privacy.
There are three types of proxy servers, with varying degrees of protection:
- Transparent, which doesn’t hide your IP or the fact that you are using a proxy server.
- Anonymous, which hides the IP, but not that you use a proxy.
- Elite, which hides both your IP address and your use of a proxy server.
3. Using Tor
Tor, or The Onion Router, is an open-source and free network of server nodes run by volunteers that hides your identity behind layers of proxy (like an onion, hence the name).
When using the Tor browser, it first connects to a random publicly listed entry node. Next, the traffic goes through a randomly chosen middle node. Finally, the traffic goes through the third and final node.
As each node in the path will only know the IP of the nodes immediately before and after it, it’s almost impossible to figure out the original (your) IP address, even if someone could intercept the traffic from the final node to the destination server.
This makes Tor excellent at hiding your real IP address, but all this bouncing from node to node has its price. The tradeoff comes in speed as with Tor, the traffic takes longer to complete the journey.
How to Detect if Your Visitors are Using a VPN, Proxy, or Tor?
Although there are plenty of legitimate reasons why someone would want to hide their IP address, there are many of those that aren’t so legitimate.
Sites like Netflix, for example, block VPNs (they have a list of known VPN IP addresses) to protect copyright holders and make sure they receive money for people watching their movies or TV shows.
Another reason why you might want to detect if someone is hiding their IP some other way is to combat spam. Let’s say someone is posting spam on your website. If you try to block their IP, they can come back with another one since they are behind a proxy. In that case, your best course of action might be to block a range of IPs for that proxy.
Click fraud is another ever-present threat that online business owners have to deal with. It is estimated that fake PPC clicks cost companies $60 million per year and click fraud traffic is growing at an alarming rate (50% per year).
Finally, you also want to know where your visitors are coming from to fight off hackers.
Let’s say your website caters to the US-based audience and perhaps some UK and Europe. But then, looking at the analytics, you notice that your second-largest audience source is China and your content in no way caters to that particular audience. Knowing that China has the largest population of hackers in the world, this can be worrying.
All that said, how do you detect the use of a VPN, proxy server, or Tor?
There are several ways to do that, but they are either overly complicated or they can only detect one of them. For example, we already mentioned how Netflix has a list of known VPN IPs they block if someone tries to connect through.
IPInfo provides a much simpler solution with its Privacy Detection API. This API detects different methods that your visitors might be using to hide their real IPs, including VPN, proxy, Tor, or hosting.
The Privacy Detection API performs full Internet-wide scans to detect up to 10 million active VPNs. This is then combined with data on Tor exit nodes, HTTP and SOCKS proxies and IPInfo’s own IP type detection to find the IP ranges belonging to their user’s hosting providers.
IPinfo is a comprehensive IP address data and API provider with flexible pricing plans to meet your business needs. We handle billions of API requests per month, serving data like IP geolocation, ASN, mobile carrier, privacy detection, and hosted domains. Sign up for a free account or contact our data experts to learn more.