How to Hide Your IP Address: 4 Methods Compared for 2026
Your IP address gives away more than you think; here are the four practical ways to mask it, ranked by protection and effort.
What your IP address reveals
Your IP address exposes more than most people realize: your approximate location, usually down to the city, your internet provider, and a persistent identifier that advertisers, websites, and snoops use to link your activity across sessions. It is also how streaming platforms enforce regional catalogs and how forums enforce bans. Hiding it severs all of those links at once.
Method 1: a VPN, the best fit for most people
A VPN replaces your IP with one belonging to its server and encrypts everything in transit, so even your ISP sees only scrambled traffic to a single endpoint. It covers every app on the device rather than just the browser, and it works for streaming, travel, and public Wi-Fi. Surfshark protects unlimited devices on one $1.99-per-month plan, making it the cheapest way to hide every screen you own.
Method 2: the Tor Browser, for maximum anonymity
Tor bounces your traffic through three volunteer-run relays, so no single point ever knows both who you are and what you are visiting. It costs nothing and resists tracking better than any mainstream tool, but the price is speed: pages crawl, streaming is impractical, and the protection covers only what happens inside the Tor Browser window itself.
Method 3: a proxy, quick but shallow
A proxy swaps your IP for a single app, usually a browser, without encrypting anything. That makes it fine for a throwaway location check and wrong for anything sensitive, since your ISP and any network snoop still read your traffic in full. Free public proxies add their own hazard: whoever operates them can watch everything passing through, and you rarely know who that is.
Method 4: switch networks for an instant reset
Toggling from Wi-Fi to mobile data, or joining a different network entirely, hands you a new IP immediately, which is useful when a site has rate-limited or blocked your current address. But the fresh IP still points at you, still reveals your carrier and rough location, and changes nothing about tracking. Treat it as a reset button rather than a privacy tool.
Which method should you use?
Use a VPN for everyday privacy, streaming, and anything involving your real accounts; use Tor when anonymity genuinely outweighs speed; use a proxy only for disposable lookups; and keep network-switching for quick unblocks. For whole-household coverage, a single Surfshark subscription hides the IP on every phone, laptop, and TV you own, with CleanWeb ad-blocking thrown in and no device cap to manage.
Frequently asked questions
Is hiding your IP address legal?
Does incognito mode hide my IP address?
Can websites still track me after I hide my IP?
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