What is my IP address?
The address above is the one this site's server saw your request arrive from. It is not stored here. What it reveals is your internet provider and a rough region, usually a country reliably and a city sometimes. What it does not reveal is your name, your street, or who else is behind the same address.
Your public IP address is shown above. It is the address the internet uses to send responses back to your connection, and it is the one every website, API and email server you contact can see. We look it up by asking a public IP endpoint from your browser, the same way any site would.
An IP address is like the return address on an envelope. Without it, servers would have nowhere to send the pages you request. Your home or phone gets its public IP from your internet provider, and everyone in your household or on your office network usually shares the same public IP.
You may have an IPv4 address (four numbers like 203.0.113.10) or a newer IPv6 address (a longer hexadecimal string). Both do the same job. Your private IP, the one your router assigns inside your own network, is different and is not visible to the wider internet.
How a website reads this
This is the exact call a page makes. Nothing else is involved, and nothing is sent anywhere: the value is read in your browser and displayed to you.
fetch('/api/ip')There is no JavaScript API that reads your IP address. A page has to make a request and have the other end report back which address the request arrived from. Here that other end is this site's own endpoint, which echoes the address and writes nothing down.
- Needs your permission
- No, it is read silently
- Can it be faked
- Partly. You cannot edit it, but you can change which address a site sees by routing through a VPN, a proxy or Tor. The site then sees that exit point instead, which is a real change and not a disguise.
- Contribution to a fingerprint
- Not counted. Left out of the fingerprint estimate on purpose. An IP address is an identifier in its own right rather than a signal that narrows a crowd, and mixing the two would inflate the score. How we estimate this.
What a website actually learns from your IP address
The gap between what people assume an IP reveals and what it really reveals is wide in both directions. This is the honest version.
| What a site can work out | How reliable | How it gets there |
|---|---|---|
| Your internet provider | Reliable | The address block is registered to the provider, and that registration is public. |
| Your country | Reliable | Address blocks are allocated regionally, so the country is rarely wrong outside of VPN traffic. |
| Your region or state | Usually right | Derived from the provider's own network layout, which mostly follows geography. |
| Your city | Often wrong | The database maps the provider's equipment, not you. Fixed lines in small towns are commonly placed in the nearest large one. |
| Your street or postcode | No | Nothing at this level is available from an IP address. A site claiming otherwise is guessing or lying. |
| Your name or address | No | That link exists only in your provider's subscriber records, released under legal process, not to websites. |
| Which device you used | No | Every device behind your router shares one public address, so an IP identifies a household, not a person. |
| Whether you visited before | Only briefly | Consumer addresses are reassigned and mobile ones change as you move. This is precisely why fingerprinting exists. |
The two rows that surprise people most are the last two. An IP is a weak identifier for a person and a decent one for a household, which is the opposite of how it is usually described.
Why is my IP location slightly wrong?
Because there is no map from addresses to places, only a commercial database that infers one. Providers publish which blocks they hold and roughly where they operate, and geolocation vendors refine that with traceroute timings, customer-supplied data and user corrections. Nothing in that chain knows where you are sitting.
The result is systematically wrong in predictable ways. Traffic from a small town is often attributed to the regional hub it routes through. Business connections are placed at a company's registered address rather than the branch you are in. Mobile networks are the worst case: the address usually belongs to a gateway that can be hundreds of kilometres from the mast you are connected to.
There is also a well documented failure mode where a database with no better answer places an address at a country's geographic centre. That default has repeatedly landed on real homes and made life miserable for the people living there, which is worth knowing before treating any IP location as evidence of anything.
If a site needs your actual location, it has to ask. That is what the browser prompt on the location page is for, and the difference in accuracy between the two, metres against tens of kilometres, is visible on this site by simply comparing the two cards.
Is an IP address personal data?
Under the GDPR the answer is generally yes, and the reasoning matters more than the label. Personal data covers information relating to a person who can be identified directly or indirectly, and an IP address can identify a subscriber when combined with records the provider holds. The Court of Justice of the European Union reached that conclusion for dynamic IP addresses held by a website operator in Breyer v Germany (C-582/14), on the basis that the operator had lawful means to obtain the subscriber identity from the provider.
The practical consequence for a site owner is that server logs containing IP addresses fall under data protection law: they need a lawful basis, a retention period and a place in the privacy notice. Many analytics products truncate or hash IPs for exactly this reason.
The consequence for you is smaller than it sounds. Being personal data means it is regulated, not that it is secret. Every server you contact necessarily sees it, because the connection cannot work otherwise.
What changes with a VPN, Tor, or a mobile connection
A VPN substitutes the address of its exit server, so sites see that instead of yours. This is a real change, not a disguise: your traffic genuinely arrives from there. What it does not do is make you anonymous, because your timezone still says where you live, your language list still says which one you read, and your graphics hardware has not changed at all. The mismatch between an IP in one country and a timezone in another is itself a signal.
Tor goes further by routing through several relays, so no single one knows both where traffic came from and where it is going. The exit address is shared with many other users, which is the point. It is also a published list, so sites can and do treat Tor traffic differently.
A mobile connection changes the picture in a different way. Carrier-grade NAT means thousands of subscribers can share one public address, so an IP identifies a carrier region rather than a household, and the address you present changes as you move. That makes mobile IPs poor for tracking and poor for geolocation at the same time.
Where the address on this page comes from
No JavaScript API returns your IP address, so a page has to ask a server. This site asks its own endpoint, which reads the address the request arrived from and echoes it back. It logs nothing, stores nothing and passes it to nobody.
That is worth stating because the alternative is normal. Most what-is-my-ip pages call a third-party lookup service, which means your address is handed to a company you did not choose and whose retention policy you have not read. It works, it is free, and it is the sort of quiet leak this site exists to point at, so doing it here would have been indefensible.
Private browsing against a VPN against Tor: what each one actually hides
All three are described as privacy tools and they protect completely different things. This is which signals on this site each one changes.
| Signal | Private browsing | VPN | Tor Browser |
|---|---|---|---|
| Public IP address | Unchanged | Replaced by the exit server's | Replaced by the exit relay's |
| IP location estimate | Unchanged | Follows the exit server, so it moves country | Follows the exit relay, often another continent |
| Timezone | Unchanged, and this is the classic VPN tell | Unchanged. Your IP says one country and your browser says another | Reported as UTC for every user |
| User agent | Unchanged | Unchanged | One identical string for everyone on that platform |
| Screen and viewport size | Unchanged | Unchanged | Snapped to fixed steps so many users report the same figures |
| WebGL renderer | Unchanged | Unchanged | Blocked or normalised |
| Cookies and site storage | Cleared when the window closes | Unchanged | Cleared, and isolated per site during the session |
| Your fingerprint overall | Unchanged. This is the gap people are most surprised by | Unchanged apart from the network signals | Deliberately made to match other users |
The pattern is worth reading across rather than down. Private browsing changes storage and nothing else. A VPN changes the network signals and nothing else. Only Tor Browser attacks the browser signals, and it does so by making its users identical rather than by hiding them, which is the only approach that works.
What you should know
Why sites collect it
Every server needs your IP to reply at all, so it is unavoidable. Beyond that, sites use it to guess your rough location and language, enforce regional licensing, rate-limit abuse, block fraud, and log activity for security.
Privacy implications
Your IP reveals your internet provider and an approximate location, often to the city, and it is logged almost everywhere you go. It is not your name, and it can change, but combined with other data it helps build a profile. This is the main thing a VPN hides by substituting its own IP for yours.
How to change or hide it
To change or hide your public IP, use a VPN or the Tor network, which route your traffic through another server so sites see that server's IP instead of yours. Restarting your router may also get you a new IP from your provider if yours is dynamic.
Frequently asked questions
Is my IP address private information?
It is semi-public: every site you visit sees it, but it maps to your provider and rough area rather than your identity. Treat it as sensitive but not secret.
Why is my IP location slightly wrong?
IP geolocation is an estimate based on where your provider registers the address, so it can be off by a city or show your provider's hub rather than your exact spot.
How do I hide my IP address?
Use a reputable VPN or Tor. Both replace your visible IP with one from their network, so sites no longer see your real address.
Sources
Browser behaviour changes and vendors cap these values differently, so the claims above that are not self-evident are checked against the specifications and vendor documentation below.
Last checked on . How these values are measured and estimated is set out on the methodology page.
Something wrong here? Tell us what your browser reports and it gets corrected.