Frequently Asked Questions

Your internet service provider assigns a numerical label, called an Internet Protocol (IP) address, to identify your device among billions of others. In a way, an IP address works like an online home address, because devices use IPs to find and communicate with each other. Here’s how an IP address directs data to its destination. First, you enter a website name (example.com) in your browser. However, your computer does not understand words – only numbers. So it must first find the IP address of that website (example.com = 84.23.54.21). It finds it on the web, processes the website, and displays it on your screen.

It is unlikely that someone would actually take control of your IP address and use it as if it were their own. However, some parties do have access to your IP address and can collect data related to it. For example, your ISP (Internet Service Provider) can always see which websites you have visited on the internet. At the same time, the websites you visit can track your location and actions in order to personalize their offers. When you search for flights, for example, the website may detect that you are browsing from a wealthy country in Europe and may automatically increase the prices.

There are two main types of IP address formats: Version 4 (IPv4) and Version 6 (IPv6). The first format consists of four numbers ranging from 1 to 256 separated by dots, such as 54.231.23.248. The more advanced version, IPv6, is longer and uses both numbers and letters, for example: 2012:ca2:0:1267:0:323:4:5. Even though most of the available IPv4 addresses have already been allocated on the World Wide Web, IPv4 is still used much more widely today than IPv6. For this reason, our tool focuses primarily on this IP address format.

Your IP address reveals a lot of information about your location, meaning the place from which you are browsing, including the country, region, postal code, and city. Furthermore, malicious or intrusive websites can compare this information with other details found in cookies and metadata, creating an even more revealing profile of your identity.

You can protect your IP address by hiding it. This is done by using a VPN service, which routes your connection through another IP address, thereby hiding your real IP address. In addition, VPNs offer many other advantages. You gain greater online privacy and security because your internet traffic is encrypted and cannot be read by third parties or misused by hackers.

Have you ever wondered how your computer actually connects to the internet? Many complex components are involved in this seemingly simple process. First, there is the router, which either creates a Wi-Fi signal for your computer or provides a port for using a cable. The router then sends a signal to your Internet Service Provider (ISP). To simplify things a bit, your public IP address is the unique IP address from the pool of internet addresses that is assigned to your router by your Internet Service Provider. On the other hand, a private IP address is assigned within a local network, such as the one created by a Wi-Fi router. This address cannot be used to identify your computer on the internet. Putting it all together: every device connected to the same Wi-Fi network will have its own private IP address, but they will share the same public IP address (because they all use the same router to connect to the internet). You have probably guessed that our tool only displays the public IP address, because it is impossible for an external observer to detect the private IP address of your device.