A fake IP address on your Android and iOS devices would protect your real IP address. Whether you like it or not, there’s an IP address on your phone. That can be more invasive than your actual telephone number, but together, if someone were to obtain both of these, you could be in some serious trouble. It’s easy enough to use someone’s phone number to find out what name and address is registered to the phone.
But with an IP address, you can hijack a persons internet session, get their login passwords and usernames, and access email, membership sites, or just sit and watch, waiting to intercept other private data. The reason that smartphones like Android and iPhone are more susceptible to this is because most people are going to access the internet from public places with their phone.
There are a number of ways to hide, or fake your IP address on a smartphone, but if security and privacy is your goal, then L2TP VPN is pretty much your best choice. There are other VPN protocols out there like OpenVPN, SSTP, and PPTP, but for these two phones, L2TP is going to be your best bet. Why?
Well, first of all, you phone comes with a VPN ‘client’ for L2TP, which means you don’t have to install any extra software – it was made ready to use this VPN.
The same is true for PPTP, but PPTP is an older version of VPNs, and is not as secure. Some people say that it’s faster, and some services offer this VPN protocol as a discounted VPN package. Don’t get me wrong – it’s better than nothing, and it does work. In fact, YOU probably won’t notice a difference. But there are some security disadvantages to PPTP.
There are several other types of VPNs out there, but they’re not as widely available, or not made for mobile devices. For example, Cisco has a couple of VPNs for smartphones – but that’s just the thing – you can only get them from one source – Cisco. With L2TP VPN you have a choice of tens if not hundreds of VPN services out there, all with different package options, features, and other goodies.
If you’re looking for a different protocol that L2TP, then you must REALLLY, REALLY know what you want. If this is the case, just remember that you’ll be depending on a third party application for your security – which is a security risk in itself, and for iPhones you’ll have to ‘jailbreak’ you phone, which is a risk I don’t have to say too much about. If you’re not sure about all this VPN stuff, the there’s no reason you have to even consider anything other than PPTP or L2TP to fake your IP address. A typical service will cost you $5 to $20 USD a month depending on the service, the VPN protocol, and the length of contract you sign up for.