Your IP address should be protected - its like your personal identification number for the internet. Even if you connect to the internet at public places, your individual devices can still be identified, traced, and intercepted. But conspiracy theory nerd stuff isn't all your IP address controls, and anyone who travels knows that having an IP address from a different country can open some doors while closing others. The point is that to access the full internet safely, you need to have IP address hiding software.

Lets talk privacy. So most people don't blink an eye when they get on the internet. Public internet zones, or public wifi is the most susceptible to being monitored by unscrupulous characters. It's super easy to use something called a 'packet sniffer' to watch all traffic over a shared network, and they can use this to hijack your internet session, essentially stealing your identity online.

Even if you're on a private connection, say, at home, all that data is going through your ISPs servers, and while there's most likely not going to be some super hacker waiting for you at your ISPs servers, the fact that information about your browsing, buying, and streaming habits is stored there is a bit unnerving. PLUS, if you're in The US, there's large chance that the government has access to this data. Even if you're not a hippie activist, this information can be used to make a profile of you and could possibly affect other aspects of your life.

But lets get always from all that stuff because a lot of it is just conceptual, and won't affect most people. The stuff that will affect you directly, well, most users anyway, is entertainment online. For example, Netflix is only available in certain countries. Though their expanding, the countries they expand to only has a local language version, and doesn't offer the whole Netflix site. So if you go to Costa Rica, though you'll be able to access Netflix, you can't get the American version, and you can't access an already established account. The same applies for Hulu, Spotify, and other media streaming sites online.

And lets say you like downloading torrents. Yeah, it's a controversial topic, so I won't choose sides here, but the point is that there are some people that are REALLY, REALLY adamant about having torrents as a right to share online. Unfortunately that means they have to do head to head battle with huge media corporations and The US government. Want to avoid the issues and just get torrents? Use some IP address hiding software and make it look like you're downloading from outside of the country. Simple and easy.

As you can see, there a bit of something for everyone when it comes to changing your IP online. If you're wondering how much this is going to cost you, there are free services out there, but anything worth a scratch is going to cost about five to ten dollars a month for a subscription to the virtual IP address network.