What is My IP Address?

An IP address is a number assigned to every device connected to the internet. It stands for Internet Protocol address, and it works like a mailing address for data. When you load a webpage, your device sends a request that includes your IP address so the server knows where to send the response back to.

The Internet Protocol is the foundational set of rules that governs how data travels across networks. Every packet of data—whether it's part of a video stream, an email, or a web page—carries the sender's IP address and the recipient's IP address in its header. Routers along the path read those addresses and forward the packet one hop closer to its destination.

Your home router has one public IP address assigned by your Internet Service Provider. Every device in your home—your phone, laptop, smart TV—shares that single public IP when communicating with the outside world. Internally, your router assigns each device a private IP address using a protocol called DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) and uses Network Address Translation (NAT) to map private addresses to the public one.

Think of it this way: your public IP is the street address of your building, while your private IP is the apartment number. The mail carrier (the internet) only sees the street address. Your router is the concierge who reads the apartment number and delivers the package to the right door.

IP addresses are assigned in blocks. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocates large blocks to Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), which then distribute smaller blocks to ISPs. Your ISP owns a range of addresses and temporarily assigns one to your router. That assignment can change each time your router restarts or your DHCP lease expires, which is why most consumer IP addresses are called dynamic.

Your IP address reveals more than most people realize, but less than Hollywood suggests. It will not give away your name, your exact home address, or what you had for breakfast. Here is what it actually exposes.

Geographic location

GeoIP databases map IP address ranges to physical locations. These databases are maintained by companies like MaxMind and IP2Location. They're accurate to the city level for most connections and accurate to the country level in virtually all cases. They won't pinpoint your house. They'll identify your city and postal code region, often within 25 miles of your actual location.

Internet Service Provider

Your IP address identifies your ISP immediately. Anyone looking at your IP can tell whether you're on Comcast, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom, or any other provider. This also reveals what type of connection you have. Residential ISPs, mobile carriers, hosting providers, and enterprise networks all have distinct IP ranges. Websites use this information to detect bots (hosting IPs are more suspicious than residential ones), enforce regional licensing, and target advertising.

Your online activity pattern

A single IP address isn't very useful for tracking. But when the same IP appears across multiple websites over weeks and months, it builds a detailed behavioral profile. Ad networks, data brokers, and analytics platforms correlate your IP across their networks to build a picture of your interests, habits, and schedule. Combined with browser fingerprinting, cookies, and login data, your IP becomes one piece of a detailed surveillance puzzle.

What it does not reveal

Your IP address does not reveal your name, email, phone number, or exact street address to websites. Only your ISP can connect an IP to a specific subscriber, and they require a legal process (subpoena or court order) to share that information. Don't believe anyone who claims they can "hack you" with just an IP address. That's not how it works.

There are two versions of the Internet Protocol in use today. IPv4 is the older, more familiar format. IPv6 is its successor, designed to solve the address shortage that IPv4 created.

IPv4

IPv4 addresses are 32-bit numbers, usually written as four decimal octets separated by periods: 192.168.1.1 or 203.0.113.42. This format provides approximately 4.3 billion unique addresses. That seemed like an inexhaustible supply when the protocol was designed in 1981, but the explosive growth of the internet consumed the available pool. IANA allocated its last blocks of IPv4 addresses in 2011. Regional registries exhausted their allocations within the following years.

The world coped by using NAT (Network Address Translation), which lets thousands of devices share a single public IPv4 address. NAT is why your router has one public IP while your devices each have private IPs like 192.168.x.x. It works, but it adds complexity and breaks certain applications that need direct device-to-device connectivity.

IPv6

IPv6 addresses are 128-bit numbers written in hexadecimal, separated by colons: 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334. This format provides 340 undecillion addresses—enough to assign a unique address to every atom on the surface of the earth, several times over. IPv6 eliminates the need for NAT because every device can have its own globally unique address.

Adoption has been gradual. As of 2025, about 45% of Google traffic uses IPv6. Major ISPs in the US, India, and Germany have strong IPv6 deployment. Others lag behind. The two protocols run in parallel (a dual-stack approach), with devices using whichever protocol is available for a given connection.

Privacy implications

IPv6 introduces a privacy concern that IPv4 largely avoided. In early IPv6 implementations, devices used their hardware MAC address as part of the IPv6 address, making it trivially trackable across networks. Modern operating systems now use Privacy Extensions (RFC 4941) that generate temporary, randomized interface identifiers. If you're concerned about IPv6 tracking, ensure your operating system has privacy extensions enabled. A VPN handles this automatically by routing all traffic through the VPN tunnel regardless of IP version.

Every device that connects to the internet needs an IP address, but not every device needs a public one. The Internet Protocol reserves specific address ranges for private use—addresses that routers will never forward across the public internet.

Private address ranges

Three blocks of IPv4 addresses are reserved for private networks, as defined in RFC 1918:

• 10.0.0.0 – 10.255.255.255 (16.7 million addresses)
• 172.16.0.0 – 172.31.255.255 (1 million addresses)
• 192.168.0.0 – 192.168.255.255 (65,536 addresses)

If you run ipconfig on Windows or ifconfig on Mac/Linux and see an address in one of these ranges, that's your private IP. It identifies your device on your local network, but no one on the internet can reach you using that address directly.

How NAT bridges the gap

Your router performs Network Address Translation to connect your private devices to the public internet. When your laptop sends a request to a website, the router replaces the private source address with its public address, keeps a record of the translation, and when the response comes back, reverses the process and delivers the data to the correct internal device.

This is why the IP address shown at the top of this page is your router's public IP, not your device's private IP. Every device in your household shares the same public IP. Your ISP and any website you visit only see that single address.

Why this matters for privacy

Because all your household devices share one public IP, anyone monitoring that IP sees aggregated traffic from everyone in your home. They can't distinguish which device made which request based on IP alone (they use other techniques like cookies and browser fingerprinting for that). But it also means that one person's activity can affect the entire household. If one device triggers a rate limit or a ban, every device on the network is affected.

If you're reading this page without a VPN, the IP address shown above is visible to every website you visit. Here are the main methods to hide it, ranked by effectiveness.

VPN (recommended)

A Virtual Private Network encrypts all your internet traffic and routes it through a server in another location. Websites see the VPN server's IP address instead of yours. Your ISP can see that you're connected to a VPN, but cannot see what you're doing. A good VPN also prevents DNS leaks, WebRTC leaks, and IPv6 leaks—common holes that cheaper VPNs miss.

Fexyn VPN uses WireGuard for speed, VLESS Reality for censorship resistance, and OpenVPN for compatibility. The multi-protocol approach means it works in countries that actively block VPN traffic, including China and Iran. See pricing and start a free trial.

Tor Browser

Tor routes your traffic through three volunteer-operated relays, encrypting it at each step. It provides strong anonymity, but the trade-off is speed. Tor is significantly slower than a VPN because of the multi-hop routing. It's also limited to browser traffic by default—your other applications won't be protected. Tor is excellent for high-stakes anonymity (journalists, whistleblowers) but impractical for everyday browsing, streaming, or gaming.

Proxy servers

A proxy server acts as an intermediary between your device and the internet. Your requests go to the proxy first, which forwards them to the destination. The destination sees the proxy's IP. The problem: most proxies don't encrypt your traffic. Your ISP can still see everything. Free proxies are particularly dangerous—many log your traffic and sell the data. They also tend to inject ads or malware. Use a proxy only when you understand the risks and encryption is handled at another layer (like HTTPS).

Mobile data

Switching from Wi-Fi to mobile data gives you a different IP address (your carrier's), but it doesn't hide you. Your carrier knows who you are, assigns you an IP from their pool, and can log your traffic. Your IP still reveals your approximate location and your carrier's identity. This approach changes your IP, but it doesn't protect you.

Privacy from surveillance

Your IP address is a persistent identifier that ties your browsing activity together. Advertising networks track you across millions of websites using your IP as one input to a broader fingerprint. Your ISP can see every domain you visit (DNS queries are unencrypted by default) and in many countries is legally required to retain that data for months or years. Hiding your IP with a VPN breaks this tracking chain at the network level.

Public Wi-Fi security

Open Wi-Fi networks at coffee shops, airports, and hotels are trivially easy to monitor. An attacker on the same network can intercept unencrypted traffic, perform ARP spoofing attacks to redirect your connections through their machine, or set up a rogue access point with a familiar name. A VPN encrypts all your traffic before it leaves your device, making these attacks useless. Even if someone captures your packets, they see encrypted noise.

Accessing restricted content

Streaming services, news outlets, and other platforms restrict content by geographic region. They do this by checking your IP address against GeoIP databases. A VPN lets you connect through a server in another country, effectively changing your geographic identity. This is useful for travelers who want to access their home content libraries while abroad, or for researchers who need to view region-specific content.

Censorship resistance

Governments in countries like China, Iran, Russia, and others use deep packet inspection (DPI) to detect and block VPN traffic. Standard VPN protocols like OpenVPN and WireGuard have recognizable traffic patterns that these systems can identify and throttle. Fexyn VPN includes VLESS Reality protocol—a censorship-resistant technology that makes VPN traffic indistinguishable from normal HTTPS traffic to a major website (like microsoft.com or google.com). DPI systems cannot differentiate between your VPN connection and a legitimate visit to Microsoft's website.

Protection from targeted attacks

While your IP address alone isn't enough to "hack you," it does expand your attack surface. An exposed IP can be port-scanned to find vulnerable services, targeted with DDoS attacks, or used to probe your router for misconfigurations. Gamers, streamers, and anyone who communicates with untrusted parties (peer-to-peer connections in games or VoIP) benefit from keeping their real IP hidden. A VPN ensures that the IP others see belongs to the VPN provider, not to you.