How do IP adresses really work? Is it really sensitive information?
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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.
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