How do IP adresses really work? Is it really sensitive information?
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an IP address is your digital “address”. someone with “just” your IP address can’t really identify you, personally, but they can get a general idea of your location. The only who they can identify you personally is if your ISP gave them that information or if some website has your IP and your information (such as facebook profile, instagram profile, etc, whatever) then they know who you are. now if those companies know who you are and has your IP address, they can sell that information to data mining companies, and data mining companies can get your entire “online profile” including what websites you like to visit, etc, and some random information about you (by other companies selling their data, like what IP’s visited them, when, and what they looked at). since the data mining comapny now has your identifable information, and your browsing history, they can then sell that information to adveritsing companies to create targetted ads or create a psychological profile on you for manuplication.
Imagine a physical address in the postal system. You have a home address that you share with your family, and send letters to other people with other addresses. IP addresses are the same, each router has its own (your ISP provides you with one, usually) and you can connect to (almost) any other IP on the internet.
IPs aren’t really sensitive only by themselves, though they can be used to track people accross a website. For example, if you visit my website and I see 8 requests in the span of a few minutes, I’ll know they were from the same visitor. I could also use some services that provide IP geolocation (estimate) that could tell me which internet provider you have and the city were you’re in.
What common “VPN” services do to “protect you” is acting as an intermediate: you send all your correspondence to the VPN server via a secure tunnel and they send it to its real destinations. The other end sees the message coming from the VPN’s IP address and not yours, so they can’t see your actual address.
Your internet service provider assigns an IP address to you. That IP address changes somewhat frequently. That IP address is one of the things, but not the only thing, that identifies your device on the internet for a specific period of time.
IP addresses are not sensitive and are not unique. There are a limited number of IP addresses available and there are so many devices on the internet today, that most people are sharing IP addresses. Every single person on your street could have the exact same IP address right now. You could wake up tomorrow morning and have a completely different IP address.
The only specific information the average person can get from your currently assigned IP address is your city and the name of your internet service provider.
Mailing address is not a terrible analogy, although it’s more like a PO box, because it doesn’t say exactly where you are but it does say the general location. To get an exact address someone would have to convince a court judge that they need to know it, and the judge would make your Internet company tell them.
Every time you open a website the website sees your IP address because it has to know where to send the webpage to. So it’s not really *that* secret. Nonetheless, there are annoying things that annoying people can do with the address. Mostly, they can flood it with junk mail, stuffing the box full, so that when you open a webpage you have to sort through all the junk mail and it slows you down. If you’re playing an online game against someone else, and they know your IP address, and the game is important enough, they can flood your mailbox with junk mail and slow down the game for you. If it gets too slow you might even get kicked out of the game automatically, and then they win. Similarly, if you were live-streaming on Twitch for example, they could make your stream stop working. For this reason, people who are important online will often try to hide their IP address, even though it’s not especially sensitive.
if you want a complete breakdown of all the digits and nat’s and gateways and what not it’s a long study.
but generically speaking it’s nothing more than a number to identify a device on a network.
another example is people having unique names or nicknames in a group. just so people know whos being talked to or is talking.
it’s only sensitive because it can let people find your device and therefore more about the user(you in this case) that you may not want.
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