Can One Track My Real IP Address When I Use VPNs?

April 12, 2022
enterprise-solution

Most people feel insecure while using the Internet on their devices. The reason is that they always have a threat in their mind: one can track their real IP address and online activities. Well, you should feel insecure about it. Because everything we do on Internet, in some manner, is always being tracked.
Your web browser history, searches, and online videos you watch or download; every web page you visit and activity gets tracked. Not only this, your geographic location, what device you use, and at what you access the Internet every information is collected.

You might not know that this information is usually sold to third parties for money. Moreover, you don’t know who is tracking your activities and storing the data and who they’re selling it to. But the good news is that there are some things you can consider to make your online activities private.
One of these things is a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

Now, some questions come to your mind, like will a VPN be able to hide your geographic location? Are you still being tracked by third parties?

To understand this, we have to understand each aspect of VPN closely. So, without any further ado, let’s get into it! 

Important note: The sole purpose of this post is to educate people. We are strictly against any online intrusion or cyber-attack activity.

What is a VPN?

Virtual Private Network, aka VPN, essentially establishes a private network when you are using the Internet. If your device is connected to a VPN, your device becomes anonymous on the Internet. Usually, your IP address hides from websites and limits the web search engines to collect your information.

VPN hides your IP address and doesn’t let third parties know who you are. In addition, it either hides or changes your current geographic location. As a result, it becomes tougher to track or identify your device if you have a VPN. Moreover, some VPNs encrypt your network traffic that doesn’t let others see what you are searching for online.

You might have an idea about what a VPN is. Now, let us extract out how exactly a VPN works.

How Does a VPN Work?

When you connect your device to the VPN network, your device establishes communication with one of the VPN service provider’s servers. Usually, VPN providers have different VPN servers located at different locations in the world. So, you might sometimes don’t come to know which server you will connect to.

Picture this: Suppose your laptop is connected to a VPN and you want to visit bing.com. With the help of a VPN application, your device sends an encrypted request to the VPN server that you want to visit bing.com.

After that, the VPN server will send a request to the Bing server for the requested webpage. Bing server responds to the VPN server with the asked webpage. Once the VPN server receives the webpage, it sends back the webpage to your laptop over the encrypted connection.

Your web browser will load the bing.com webpage. It’s simple as that.

How Can a VPN Hide Someone’s Location?

Let’s recap the previous section when you use a VPN service, the VPN server forward your request from its end. Considering the example above, bing.com only knows that the webpage request is coming from the VPN server. Bing doesn’t know your existence on the other end of the VPN server.

Bing tracks the system’s IP address making the request, which is the VPN server. So, if they want to track the IP address, they will get the geographic location of the VPN server.

So, we can say that correctly using a VPN can hide your location and IP address.

Can You Still Someone Tracks You While Using a VPN?

Well, the answer is yes! Even if you are using a trustworthy VPN, you still need to be careful. But why is it so? Here are the following reasons:

  • Connecting to the Internet Before VPN

If you connect your device to the Internet before connecting with a VPN service, your device’s IP address will expose on the Internet. Therefore, you should first have to connect your device to the VPN server before you connect to the Internet Technology.

  • Logging into any Website Account

Suppose you sign into any of your website’s accounts. When you use a VPN, Google doesn’t know your IP address. But at the same time, you log in to your Google account, then Google will come to know that it’s you, and it will start tracking your activities.
Therefore it is recommended not to log into any website account if you use any VPN service. If you have pre-logged accounts, log them out, disconnect your device from the Internet, and then connect with the VPN service.

When to Use a VPN Service?

Many people use public WiFi networks while traveling (at airports, hotels, coffee shops, etc.) or away from home. These places provide free internet access to everyone, but these networks come with many risks.

Hundreds of people connect to these public networks every day, and hackers too. So a hacker can easily fetch all your personal information, bank account details, and more from a public network. But fortunately, with a VPN, you won’t have to worry about it.

Once you are connected to the VPN network, hackers won’t be able to steal your personal information, passwords, etc.

Now that you know what VPN is, how it works, how it can hide your IP address, and where to use it. So, we hope that you will make good use of the VPN. Soon we will be going to talk about Incognito Mode in detail. Till then, stay tuned with us.

Related Post