My IP address

The address is resolved on our server against a local database and is not shared with third-party services.

What the browser reports on its own

Besides the address, every site receives a packet of technical facts about your device — the browser hands them over automatically, without asking you. Here are those lines as this page sees them.

Why a connection needs an address

An IP address is your connection's return address: the provider issues it so that sites' replies have somewhere to be delivered. Every request into the network carries it, so going online “without an address” is impossible in principle — you can only arrange for sites to see an intermediate server's address instead of yours.

There are two versions. IPv4 — four numbers separated by dots (203.0.113.5); only about four billion exist and the free ones ran out long ago. IPv6 — eight groups separated by colons (2001:db8::1), enough for the foreseeable future. A modern connection often runs both at once, which matters for privacy: both addresses need hiding, not one.

What the address reveals — and what it doesn't

The address reads as a country, usually a city or region, and an autonomous system — the provider's or host's network that owns the range. Regional pricing, per-country restrictions and the “sign-in from an unusual location” warning in your mail are all built on that.

Name, phone, street and apartment cannot be derived from the address: the “address — contract — person” link exists only at the provider and is released on official request. Everything else sites know about you arrives not from the address but from the browser — cookies, accounts, device parameters.

Why the city in the readout may be wrong

The “address range — place” mapping is assembled from provider filings and indirect clues, not from coordinates. A provider may cover several regions with one range, and mobile networks route subscribers through gateways in big cities — so half a region “lives” at one point on the map.

CGNAT adds confusion: to save IPv4 addresses, an operator pushes hundreds of subscribers through one external address, while your own (100.64.x.x) never leaves its network. Bottom line: trust the country in the readout, take the city with a grain of salt.

How to change the address sites see

Rebooting the router often produces a new address — home connections use dynamic ones. But the new address comes from the same range: country, city and provider in the readout stay the same.

For outsiders to see a different address and country, traffic is passed through a VPN server: its address faces the world, yours stays between you and the server. What matters is that all protocols go through the tunnel at once — otherwise part of the requests goes direct. How true that is, the leak test shows.

One address for the whole home

Over IPv4, the phone, laptop and TV in a home network go out under a single address — the one issued to the router. Internal numbers like 192.168.0.5 live only inside the flat: sites can't see them. IPv6 is the opposite — if the provider enables it, each device gets its own external address.

So “the phone's IP” and “the computer's IP” on the same Wi-Fi are one and the same answer. Switch the phone to mobile data — the address changes together with the provider and city in the lines above: it now comes from the cellular network.

Questions and answers