Hide the IP masks your true IP address to protect your anonymity while surfing the Web. We found this portion of the application to function simply and effectively: click the lock icon, and within seconds the program has found and acquired a false IP for you. Your real and current IP addresses are displayed in the application window.

Unfortunately, Hide the IP does not stop there. Instead, the developer adds useful-sounding features, such as the ability to Search for IP by Country or Search by Anonymity, but fails to provide any controls–such as a search box or Go button–to actually use them. The program offers a few settings, such as the option to surf without cookies or launch the program with Windows. More-advanced users could theoretically add proxies by typing them into the Proxy Checker dialog or uploading a file of unspecified type, but we could not get this feature to work. When we checked the Help file, we found uninformative, one-sentence explanations of each icon in the navigation bar. The developer also threw in a bonus explanation of an icon that does not actually appear in the program.