A web page that tells you what your browser gave away the moment you arrived. No login, no form, no permission. Most pages do this. None of them tell you.
The point is not that they know your IP, but that even your IP already gives away information. That’s why they start with the information, rather than the IP being the source.
This is not intended to be for people who understand how this works.
The public IP is irrelevant, only shows the IP of the server used by your ISP, which can be at the other side of the country. It can maybe identify the ISP, but not the user, less if a dynamic changing IP is used. The public IP is always leaked if you don’t use a VPN or the TOR network.
Absolutely not, the public IP a website sees is your home IP. The resolved location will be inaccurate by design, but the IP definitely identifies you at that time.
What the website see is the current IP of the used ISP server in this moment. In the last check it was Madrid, several hundreds km from my real home. The public IP isn’t the same as my user IP, which only know my ISP and I (and the police by the ISP, if exist a court order). The public IP don’t show your real location, the website only can use your GPS data if you have it activated or if it appears in your account data (Google, Google Maps).
The public IP location is not precisely your location because your IP address does not convey that information at all. Services that locate an IP guesstimate based, mostly, on what range your IP is a part of, and what public data is available about that range.
I’m not sure about Spain (pretty confident it is the same, only a capitalist hellhole would do what you suggest), but in France and the Netherlands at least, your IP (the one a website sees) is always yours and yours only, not the IP of some ISP server.
If you can open your ports in your router and access them from the internet, then your public IP is yours. Most people can (even with a dynamic IP). If it was an ISP server, you wouldn’t be able to.
The thing a european ISP usually do is assign a dynamic IP, so that while your IP is assigned to your home router and yours only at a moment in time, it will likely change the next day, and will always change on a reboot of your router. But it still is your router’s IP at that moment in time, not a random ISP server. IPs are not physically assigned to a device
My home IP is mine, fixed, and I can verify that it is indeed my router. Yet the location of it according to locators is the other side of the country. The location locators give you for your IP being different to your actual location is not a proof that your public IP is not your actual home IP at all. And that is because an IP is not tied to a location and only your ISP can tell the location of their IPs.
I’ve never heard of that kind of network, is that a US thing? I can’t imagine having my traffic routed, as the person I replied to said, to the other side of the country before being routed to the proper destination. That is so incredibly inefficient and unnecessary. Not to mention the single point of failure.
Edit: And it makes hosting a public facing server at home a nightmare… I see no benefit to this except not having to get a large IP range to properly assign them to your customers, which sounds like capital efficiency rather than decent user experience. Did I get it right, is this a US thing? :D
Edit 2: And there are a lot of systems IP-banning abusers (it is, in fact, one of the most basic recommendations), meaning that if someone sharing that public IP gets IP banned, the entire customer group sharing the IP is troubled. Even worse if it ends up on a shared blacklist…
Depending on your location it can actually be geolocated into your specific city block, I geolocated an online friend’s IP just for the hell of it (I already knew where they lived) and it spit back out the city block they lived in as well as a lot of other very identifiable information
Also, if you can ping devices on that network using that IP you can also use that as a way to easily identify users. That’s if they have anything that isn’t firewalled, obviously, but the point stands!
I understand how all of it works. Whether it’s vibe coded or not it, it showed me stuff that I didn’t think about like arbitrary web pages can know my phone tilt, battery level??
Well maybe fingerprint duplication, some secure proxy provides a profile to follow/ plugin to install and all their customers look identical. Still gets your traffic pegged as a customer of that service.
The point is not that they know your IP, but that even your IP already gives away information. That’s why they start with the information, rather than the IP being the source.
This is not intended to be for people who understand how this works.
And as someone else said, probably vibe coded.
The public IP is irrelevant, only shows the IP of the server used by your ISP, which can be at the other side of the country. It can maybe identify the ISP, but not the user, less if a dynamic changing IP is used. The public IP is always leaked if you don’t use a VPN or the TOR network.
Absolutely not, the public IP a website sees is your home IP. The resolved location will be inaccurate by design, but the IP definitely identifies you at that time.
What the website see is the current IP of the used ISP server in this moment. In the last check it was Madrid, several hundreds km from my real home. The public IP isn’t the same as my user IP, which only know my ISP and I (and the police by the ISP, if exist a court order). The public IP don’t show your real location, the website only can use your GPS data if you have it activated or if it appears in your account data (Google, Google Maps).
The public IP location is not precisely your location because your IP address does not convey that information at all. Services that locate an IP guesstimate based, mostly, on what range your IP is a part of, and what public data is available about that range.
I’m not sure about Spain (pretty confident it is the same, only a capitalist hellhole would do what you suggest), but in France and the Netherlands at least, your IP (the one a website sees) is always yours and yours only, not the IP of some ISP server.
If you can open your ports in your router and access them from the internet, then your public IP is yours. Most people can (even with a dynamic IP). If it was an ISP server, you wouldn’t be able to.
The thing a european ISP usually do is assign a dynamic IP, so that while your IP is assigned to your home router and yours only at a moment in time, it will likely change the next day, and will always change on a reboot of your router. But it still is your router’s IP at that moment in time, not a random ISP server. IPs are not physically assigned to a device
My home IP is mine, fixed, and I can verify that it is indeed my router. Yet the location of it according to locators is the other side of the country. The location locators give you for your IP being different to your actual location is not a proof that your public IP is not your actual home IP at all. And that is because an IP is not tied to a location and only your ISP can tell the location of their IPs.
depends on the isp, my router has its own adress on the iternet
couple of friends have a different isp that layers it users behind multiple nats so half the city would show the same ip on a website
I’ve never heard of that kind of network, is that a US thing? I can’t imagine having my traffic routed, as the person I replied to said, to the other side of the country before being routed to the proper destination. That is so incredibly inefficient and unnecessary. Not to mention the single point of failure.
Edit: And it makes hosting a public facing server at home a nightmare… I see no benefit to this except not having to get a large IP range to properly assign them to your customers, which sounds like capital efficiency rather than decent user experience. Did I get it right, is this a US thing? :D
Edit 2: And there are a lot of systems IP-banning abusers (it is, in fact, one of the most basic recommendations), meaning that if someone sharing that public IP gets IP banned, the entire customer group sharing the IP is troubled. Even worse if it ends up on a shared blacklist…
Depending on your location it can actually be geolocated into your specific city block, I geolocated an online friend’s IP just for the hell of it (I already knew where they lived) and it spit back out the city block they lived in as well as a lot of other very identifiable information
Also, if you can ping devices on that network using that IP you can also use that as a way to easily identify users. That’s if they have anything that isn’t firewalled, obviously, but the point stands!
I understand how all of it works. Whether it’s vibe coded or not it, it showed me stuff that I didn’t think about like arbitrary web pages can know my phone tilt, battery level??
The opsec implications are severe.
Oh yeah, it’s insane. The only way to truly protect your identity on the internet is by not using the internet. Second best would be tor, I suppose
Well maybe fingerprint duplication, some secure proxy provides a profile to follow/ plugin to install and all their customers look identical. Still gets your traffic pegged as a customer of that service.