Repressive governments often block websites they dislike, and companies often block IP addresses based on their geographic location. Unfortunately, many governments and businesses would rather it weren’t.

Censorship – The Internet is supposed to be a place for the free and open exchange of ideas.

Many people find these ads intrusive and don’t want corporations keeping a record of their activity.

Ad networks – Companies like Google and Facebook are constantly monitoring your online browsing in order to deliver personalized ads.

Other abuse can be extremely destructive. Some kinds of misuse may be relatively harmless, such as the unauthorized use of your IP address to track you across the Internet and target you for advertising. Like any piece of personal information, there are ways others can try to exploit it. However, that doesn’t mean your IP address is safe from hackers, unethical companies, and repressive government agencies. Under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, organizations are required not to misuse the IP addresses of citizens and residents of the European Union. Your Internet service provider (ISP) also knows your IP address.īecause your IP address can be used to identify you, regulators and privacy advocates consider it to be a form of personal data. Website analytics can track site visitors, and sometimes wikis and comment boards identify contributors with their IP address. It’s relatively easy to find someone’s IP address. This numeric IP system allows roughly four billion unique IP addresses. Each of these blocks is a value between 0 and 255, meaning that each block has 256 possible values. IP addresses normally look something like this: 185.159.159.140Īn IP address is a sequence of four blocks of numbers. In the same way your email address allows others to send you an email, a remote computer needs your IP address to communicate with your computer. What is an IP address?Īn IP address, which stands for Internet Protocol address, is a unique numeric combination that identifies routers, computers, or other devices to allow them to communicate through the Internet. At the end, we’ll cover a few simple ways to hide your IP address. This article will explore the topic of IP addresses in detail, explaining what they are and why you might want to keep yours private. In this article, we discuss what an IP address is, and what are some ways you can hide your IP. But this short string of numbers can also be used to track you, so for this reason, you may want to anonymize your IP address.

Without an IP address, other computers wouldn’t be able to communicate with yours, and vice versa.

That’s because IP addresses are an important aspect of the architecture of the Internet. Even if you don’t know what an IP address is, you have probably heard the term.

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