Is there any way to hide our IP address from being disclosed or tracked ?

[mayank.dyl]

We all know that by knowing IP address, a person can locate you on any part of Earth and so can a hacker or peoples with wrong intentions. Hence comes the need to hide our IP address and surf the net freely.
Any possible way to do so for Windows OS ?

[rubberman]

Are you using a static address, or one dynamically generated by your ISP? In any case, using a VPN service (Virtual Private Network) will effectively mask your identity. There are a number of them out there. The most famous is Tor.

[johhny-marshal]

Go to administrator account and disable the permission on user account.

[JorgeM]

So, there are services out on the net that can hide your IP from the target resource. As mentioned in this thread, there are VPN services that you can subscribe to. You log on the VPN service and surf the Internet through their connection. In addition to VPN services, another alternative is to use a proxy server. When you visit a site using one of these services, the target site seees traffic coming from the provider, not you.

Just to be clear, you are only hiding your IP from the target resource. If you use a service, they will know your IP address. Whether they keep that information logged, secret or would provide it to another third party is something you need to research.

There is no way to hide your IP completely. In a TCP/IP session, to send/receive traffic, valid IPs are part of the session. When you connect to a resource on the Internet, part of that traffic has the source IP information. So if you connect to a VPN provider, they have your IP, no if/ands/buts about it.

[mayank.dyl]

Thankx @JorgeM for defining so well, can you name any VPN service provider as one mentioned by @rubberman i.e. Tor whic can be trusted in terms of not providing providing info further to any servive provider.

[JorgeM]

I really dont have a list to provide. Who you choose will ultimately depend on exactly what you are looking for. For simple anonymous browsing, some providers offer this for as little as a few dollars per month, or even for free. However, for certain features like uncapped bandwidth, shared IPs so you pull from a pool, server locations, terms of service (what you are allowed to access while connected), subscription agreements, etc... There a lot of options out there. I would suggest that you start reading and just read the reviews. If you find a provider that has the services you require, you'll quickly find information if they are not providing the trust and anonymity for their users.

[mayank.dyl]

are there also some standalone applications which can hide or mask ip address so that one can surf anonymously ?

[JorgeM]

If there are, I dont see how that would work. For example, if you think about a network connection, you have a source and destination IP. If the packets are coming from your system, the source IP has to be that of your system, otherwise, the packets would not be able to return to your computer.

That is where these proxy avoidance/VPN systems come into play. You connect to one of their systems, either by traditional VPN client, or SSL VPN connection, or even just using HTTP to an open proxy on the Internet, and your source IP is not seen by the target host. The target host only sees the source IP coming from the system that you are using.

The key here is what does the system/provider do with the information they collect about your session. Many of them specify on their websites that they either do not collect/log this information, or they will not share it with anyone.

So depending on what your intentions are, you should think about this carefully.

Rubberman mentioned Tor. I havent used them myself, but know of others that use this service.

[mayank.dyl]

Thanks a ton JorgeM.

[aryan_]

yes you can try vpn as well as tunnel concept and many more softwares which proviedes you many proxies......of diffrent diffrent countries..