IP addresses are increasingly being mapped almost all the way down to an individual address, so if you don’t want sites to know who you are or where you’re visiting from, a VPN will hide your own IP address and replace it with theirs.
Firstly, there are two main types of VPN’s…dedicated, and shared. Dedicated is where you’re the only one using that IP address…no one else has access to it. That provides a fair amount of privacy due to the encryption of the connection but very little anonymity.
Shared VPN’s can be where the anonymity kicks in…you have hundreds of people all connected to the same node at the same time…so it becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find out exactly who exactly was doing what on a particular IP at any given time.
However, what is most important is the VPN Providers logging policy.
Do they keep ANY logs which would allow themselves or a 3rd party to match an IP address and a time stamp to a user of their service?
Below are what appear to be more anonymity-friendly VPN services based on logging policy but we advise to never fully trust any provider 100%:
1 | AirVPN | Our Rating – 96.6% |
| AirVPN Review (10% Price Discount! – Use code bvfu_10) | ||
2 | PrivateInternetAccess | Our Rating – 85% |
| PrivateInternetAccess Review | ||
3 | TorGuard | Our Rating – 91.6% |
4 | IPVanish | Our Rating – 93.4% |
| IPVanish Review | ||