How to Avoid Internet Censorship on Your iPhone

With the rise of the internet came the rise of government censorship of the internet. While at the beginning anyone with a strong enough internet connection could go ahead and get whatever data they wanted to, many organizations today are restricting important information and content to a particular region or blocking it altogether. The internet needs to fight back, and there are methods to do so.

While you might already be aware of or already using methods on your home computer, you should be aware of ways to fight back on your iPhone as well. While it may not be as obvious as on other platforms, there are tools you can use and apps that will help you communicate with whoever you need to and get the data that you have a right to.

Here are a few ways to avoid censorship on your iPhone:

Use a Proxy

Most of the methods used to censor the internet involve the use of an IP address and regional blocking. Regional restrictions work by using your IP address to determine where in the world you are located. If you are in a region where the content is not allowed by the ISP or whoever is in control of the internet, then the website won’t show up or it will act as if it won’t exist.

What a proxy program or app on your iPhone will do is act as a relay or go-between in order to make your computer have a different IP address as far as anyone watching is concerned. This can change the region and allow you to bypass many of the ways used to block you.

If you are ever curious as to what proxy to use, then search online for what other people say about the products and see if a lot of other people use it. Be careful, as proxies are probably the most popular type of app malware developers like to disguise their programs as.

Use Tor

Another extremely popular way a lot of professionals use to bypass internet censorship on their iPhones is to use Tor, which is a network developed in order to maintain a high level of privacy on the internet. It works by effectively relaying a request through a series of IP addresses on the network (who volunteer), scrambling the requesting IP address for the purposes of tracking or blocking. Since the IP address looks different, the user can get around regional blocks if set right.

Unfortunately, Tor on the iPhone still isn’t the easiest thing to use and while the browser is acceptable it is far from the ideal internet browsing experience when there are other options available. In addition to this, it is well-known that users of Tor are commonly watched more closely due to the criminal associations with Tor, despite the fact that there is nothing unlawful about the network whatsoever. As a general recommendation, it is best not to get Tor unless you know exactly what you are doing or have no other options available to you.

Use a Virtual Private Network

While almost any tool used to get you to avoid internet censorship on your iPhone will use a way to hide your IP address and trick or misdirect the methods of censorship, the Virtual Private Network is the tool that does this best and offers you other features.

What a Virtual Private Network (VPN) will do is connect your iPhone to an offsite secure server using an encrypted connection. This encrypted connection is a great protection for you from hackers as well as government surveillance, as no one will ever be able to tell what you are downloading or uploading regardless of what network you are using. Using a secure server will mask your IP address as you would using a proxy or Tor, but you will almost certainly have more options when it comes to what country you appear to be browsing from, allowing you to see content restricted to a single country.

There are quite a few services out there that will fit the bill when it comes to the iPhone, but not all of them are equal. It might be best to read a few reviews before you make any purchases. Whatever you choose, just know that when it comes to internet censorship, the best proxy can probably only match an average VPN, making a VPN worth the slight cost.

Thank you for reading, and I hope that you will take these tips into consideration and consider getting a VPN to take back the fight against online censorship.