Same IP Address but different?

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So l just read a post but it was three years old so I couldn’t respond to it to get help from there and I can’t find anything else regarding this particular question. So it’s my understanding after reading another post where somebody had went to Google on each of their devices to get their IP address and they were wondering why they had a different IP address. So what I learned from that is that your router gives out one IP address, OK makes sense. But I was trying to find out if an app knows if you have two accounts but on separate devices…but all I keep finding is yes because you have the same IP address… But, i’m still kind of confused because each of my devices themselves have a different IP address.
They do start with the four same #s, but the address is still different. So I guess my question is what address does an app get? Do they get the router address ip address or do they get the device IP address? I’m genuinely wondering because what I’m trying to do is make a another TikTok account, but I wanna make sure that it has absolutely no connection to my other account. I’m trying to do an experiment on views. Now on the device that I’m trying to set up a new account on, I logged into Xfinity mobile instead of my home Wi-Fi network so will that give me a different router IP address or what? So if anybody can help me out on this, l would truly appreciate it. My my brain is just not braining right now.

In: Technology

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

So basically it boils down to the fact that you have both a local/private IP address and an external/public IP address. The private IPs don’t matter to anything outside of your local (connected to your router) network, they can only see the public IP address.

Analogy to try to make this a bit more clear. Think of the getting a package in the mail. The mail carrier uses the address (Public IP) to make sure it gets to the right place. Once it gets to the destination, the receiver (router) uses the name on the package (Private IP) to get the package to the right person.

Now if you order a lot of packages on multiple accounts from say Amazon, and it’s all going to the same address, then they can tell if more than 1 account is ordering packages to that address because the destination is the same. Even if you used a different name on every package, They would still be able to tell.

The only main difference between the analogy and the internet is that devices outside of your local network cannot tell what your private IP address is, for both security reasons and because they don’t need to know (the router handles it). But devices/websites are still able to tell if multiple accounts are at the same location because the multiple accounts are using the same public IP.

If you want more info, look into NAT (Network Address Translation) and how the internet is structured. Each part is fundamentally simple concepts at high levels but gets complicated due to the number of the parts and how they interact together.

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