Privacy News What Your IP Address Reveals Every Time You Visit a Website

[Brownie2019]

Content source

https://hackread.com/what-your-ip-address-reveals-when-you-visit-a-website/

Your IP address can reveal your location, ISP, connection type, and VPN use to websites, ad networks, and trackers before a page even loads.
Every site, ad network and tracker you load gets your IP address before anything else. Here is what they can work out from it, what they cannot, and what changes when you hide it.

Before a web page shows a single word, your device has already handed the server one piece of information: its IP address. There is no opting out of that step. The server needs a return address for the page, in the same way a letter needs one to get a reply.

From that address alone, a website learns roughly where you are, which company sells you internet access, whether you are on a home line, an office network or a phone, and whether you are trying to hide. It learns all of that without a cookie, a login or your consent. It does not learn your name or where you live.

What a Website Reads From Your Address
A website does not work any of this out by itself. It looks the address up in an IP intelligence database, a commercial product that returns a profile in a few milliseconds.

Location comes first. MaxMind, one of the most widely used suppliers, estimates that its data places a visitor in the right country 99.8% of the time. For US addresses, it puts accuracy at about 80% for the state and 66% for the city, counted as anywhere within 50 km.

Full Story:

What Your IP Address Reveals Every Time You Visit a Website

Your IP address can reveal your location, ISP, connection type, and VPN use to websites, ad networks, and trackers before a page even loads.

hackread.com

 

[Halp2001]

What I find interesting about this topic isn't so much that a website can determine our approximate location or ISP, but rather what happens when that information is combined with all the other data collected on a daily basis. Individually, each piece of data may seem harmless, but over months or years, the accumulation of information can build fairly detailed profiles of people.

It's not about being paranoid, since much of this data collection serves legitimate purposes, but about being aware of how much information we leave behind, the value it can have to third parties, and why it's worth being mindful of what we share.

 

[Wrecker4923]

For a VPN, Firefox VPN (a proxy through Fastly, reportedly with no logs but no audit) is free for 50 GB per month. Cloudflare One (24-hour logs, no audit) is free, although it doesn’t hide your general geographic location. It does at least hide your IP address. With both, the IP addresses seem to change with each connection throughout the day.

With ISP CGNAT, the IP addresses aren’t fixed if rebooting the router daily. Windows IPv6 addresses change every seven days, and Android’s change daily. Mine only reveal a general geographic location, just like Cloudflare One.

 

[Brahman]

My IP Address

The main tools for checking IP address privacy. Showing Your IP Address, Reverse IP Lookup, Hostname, and HTTP Request Headers, Your Country, State, City, ISP/ASN, and Local Lime, Whois Lookup, TCP/IP OS fingerprinting, WebRTC Leak Test, DNS Leak Test, and IPv6 Leak Test.

browserleaks.com

 

[ghostkernel]

Public ips are not the same as private ips. These are assigned via your home Internet or cellular providers. While they give a approximate location, it is not an exact location such as a home address or gps coordinates. Websites can only approximate your general location. Not something one should be concerned about.