eli5 What are the consequences of someone knowing your ip and/or location/country?

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Asking this because someone who has a beef on me told me that he knew my ip and where I message from.
I’m super ignorant in computer stuff, along with being paranoic about someone messing my computer/Phone up.
What is the worst harm which they can do to my laptop and/or personal information
Thanks for reading

In: Technology

10 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Probably very little risk.

Your IP address can give someone a _general_ location for you, based on how large your ISP is and the geographic area they cover. So, for example, if you knew my IP address you could figure out what city I live in. That isn’t going to help you too much on its own – my city has about 8M people in the greater metro area.

Now, if they have _other_ information about me, they might be able to narrow it down further using my city as a starting point.

They could also use your IP to try and penetrate your home network and mess with devices there, but odds are your router’s firewall is robust enough to prevent that from happening unless they are farily sophisticated. Reality is that your home network is always under constant attack and the firewall keeps it at bay.

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