Your IP Address is: 3.22.42.25
Continent: North America
Country: United States
Other: US
City: Dublin
Lat: 40.0992
Long: -83.1141
Timezone: America/New_York
ISP: Amazon.com, Inc.
Browser: Unknown
OS: Unknown OS Platform
Flag: 
Above is an example of some of the information collected about your device for each webpage you visit. Use a VPN to hide your true information.
If that’s not enough to make you think twice about where and what you are clicking, visit this page to get a better idea of just how much data can be seen about you with every web page click:
https://deviceinfo.me
VPN’s (Virtual Private Networks) and Tor are our main resources to combat online snooping of our activity. Both obscure our identity if done properly and are extremely useful tools to achieve any anonymity these days. VPN’s create an encrypted tunnel to hide our activity from the ISP (Internet Service Provider) and anyone that they share their logs with, such as government intelligence agencies. They also change our IP address which is extremely useful, arguably necessary for any chance at anonymity.
Tor is discussed in Internet Browsers section, please visit that page to learn more. Tor provides an excellent layer of anonymity online and has many valuable use cases for the privacy minded person. Consider donating to the Tor Project to help keep it alive.
Back to VPN’s, it is important to remember that while VPN’s hide our traffic from our ISP, they also consolidate our traffic. This means if you use the same VPN service for your laptop, desktop and phone, you just linked all of those devices and traffic together in one centralized fashion. Not all VPN companies are considered safe, some (especially the free ones) sell your online activity data to third parties. Consider buying your VPN service anonymously using cash, cryptocurrency, or virtual cards such as Privacy.com to further hide your true identity.
Our top several VPN services that we trust and recommend:
Dedicated IP VPN service:
(The first three VPN’s on the list above have my personal highest trust, however there are others out there as well. I only mention PIA due to them offering a dedicated IP address which I touch on below.)
However you should do your own careful research on any company that you choose to trust, know that many of the VPN review sites are paid for by…. VPN companies and other actors, so take all with a grain of salt. Some VPN companies accept anonymous payment such as cash or cryptocurrency to truly hide your identity if done properly.
Free VPN’s: On Android phones, a great option beyond those already listed is Calyx VPN service, and on most devices Windscribe, both offer free VPN services. While I would not use these primarily, they are good tools to have to use occasionally, to change your IP address for some quick task.
Free VPN’s in general can do some fairly horrendous things such as lump your traffic in with bad actors such as child predators sharing horrific content, or people doing other illegal and nefarious things. While I like free, a VPN is a service well worth paying for, and something we should all be using every day. Many of the sites we visit each day collect your IP address, which if not behind a VPN or Tor, pinpoints your exact identity and location.
Because we don’t see this invisible digital activity as casual users, it’s easy to forget just how much information we reveal to a lot of sites who often sell that data to other third parties.
Proton VPN, Mullvad VPN and IVPN are my personal favorites, however I used to maintain a PIA VPN account because they offer a ‘Dedicated IP Address’ which can come in extremely handy when you encounter sites (like banks, Amazon, etc) that refuse VPN connections. This is increasingly common, and the dedicated IP address usually is more successful at getting around those sites that restrict VPN connections. However I found that I did not ever use it much, so I now rely on Proton mainly. Having multiple VPN’s isn’t a bad thing, if you have the money to maintain several.
VPN for dummies article
View a relationship map of nearly all VPN providers to see who owns who:
VPN Relationsip Map
