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Why Would Shopify Business Or Individuals Want To Hide Their IP Addresses? Let’s Explore The Top Reasons

A rack of wires connected to a computer used for ecommerce.

Founders and marketers are getting more concerned about their online privacy. Shopify brands want to protect their online assets. Everyone knows that your IP address is your online address, which links to a geo-location. People and businesses are interested in hiding it because it provides additional safety. 

Are you interested in learning how to hide an IP address? Before you do so, you should understand what an IP address is. Let’s see how IP addresses are recognized online, and the most common reasons companies and individuals decide to hide them.

IP address as part of your online identity

An IP address is at the center of the complex worldwide network known as the internet. It stands for internet protocol, which includes rules for sending and receiving data over the web. 

Since every device that connects to the internet has to be able to communicate with other devices, it needs to have an IP address. Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) assigns you an IP address.

Every request you make, for instance, when you type in a web address you want to visit, contains your IP address; so does the web server’s response that goes back to you through your ISP. The website address you want to visit is a domain name. 

DNS is in charge of resolving domain names to IP addresses. It uses a DNS lookup or the A record (for IPv4 addresses) to convert addresses successfully. 

Users can’t easily trick browsers.

Since many individuals and companies use web scrapers to extract data from websites, it can affect server performance. It can slow down a site, ultimately affecting user experience and potentially reducing profits for the website owner. That’s why there are many bot detection services in place. Generally speaking, there are browser-side and server-side bot detection services.

If you intend to use a web scraper bot, you should know that your browsers can potentially detect bots. The browser-side detection ensures that a user has made an HTTP request through a real browser. For instance, the server will send a block of JavaScript. If the browser can’t render it, the visitor is a bot, and the connection is terminated.

Browser-side detection also includes accessing specific information to ensure a user is not a bot. A web server will use a tracker to access system-level information about the device running the browser and the browser itself.

Your browser contains the navigator object with system-level information that can tell whether the user is a bot or a real one. This information includes User Agent, User Language, Time Zone, Supported HTML5 and JavaScript features and CSS rules, browser plugins, and many others.

Why it’s essential to hide an IP address in some cases

Many individuals and companies hide their IP addresses. It’s vital to do so mainly because of various cybersecurity threats. There are numerous hackers out there after sensitive personal and business data. If you don’t mask your IP address, hackers can easily target you, especially on public Wi-Fi networks, and steal your data. 

The same goes for companies. Businesses with sensitive data sets and networks connected to the internet often mask their IP addresses to protect their online assets from cyberattacks. It helps them prevent their IP addresses from tying back to operations that some see as unethical, such as web scraping. 

The main reasons companies and individuals hide their IP addresses

Individuals conceal their IP addresses because it helps them protect their identity. When you hide your IP address, you can stay anonymous while browsing. 

Hiding your IP address means nobody can discover it to find out exactly where you live. Masking it adds another layer of protection to keep you safe while browsing. Plus, it helps you protect personal data from advertisers.

Individuals often hide their IP addresses to access geo-blocked content. Whether they use a proxy or a VPN, they get an IP address of that solution’s server, bypassing geo-restrictions in seconds.

Companies hide their IP addresses because they also want to protect their data from hackers and other cybercriminals. When they mask their IP addresses, hackers can’t easily target them, and they can keep their digital assets safe. 

There is another critical reason companies decide to hide their IPs. It mainly avoids anti-scraping measures and server- and client-side bot detection services to facilitate data extraction. It helps them prevent getting their IP address on a blocklist or receiving a temporary IP ban so their web scraping operations can continue.

Conclusion

Now that you can understand why your IP address is essential and why companies and individuals decide to mask it, you can learn how to hide an IP address. As you can see, it can help you protect your online privacy. If you are running a company, it can help you extract data from websites and keep your business data safe. Visit a site here to learn more about the importance of IP addresses and how to hide them.

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