IP is almost arbitrary unless the ISP is giving up info. The IPv4 address space is pretty much depleted leaving almost all of us on NAT’d address spaces. Reboot your cable modem periodically and you will most likely land on a different address. A simple wget wrapper script querying the root servers for arbitrary “A” records and affixing “www” in front of said record and you can easily randomize your “footprint” by fetching the default site. Kick a random # generator into a while loop and it just looks like you are surfing away. Hard to pin a pattern to that.
I know this will come up, so, DON’T use public proxies either. Those things being “free” are nothing but data miners and the overseas versions are deep packet inspected (i.e., just waiting to fetch some user info to exploit).
Bottom line, security through obscurity is at play. It’ll cost you some bandwidth, but certainly not processing horsepower.
Would you recommend/consider Tor?
“IP is almost arbitrary unless the ISP is giving up info. “
The ISP is giving up the info and IP allocation is hardly arbitrary. There is no obscurity with the amount of resources they have available.
There are only 314 million people in the US and about 245 million of them use the internet. That is a relatively simple number of unique identities to track.