My IP address

Your address is resolved on our server from a local database and is never passed to third-party services.

What your browser tells about you

Beyond the address, every website receives a set of technical details about your device. You do not send them deliberately — the browser passes them on its own. Here is what this page can see.

What an IP address is

An IP address is the number your provider assigns to your connection so that replies from the network come back to you. The internet does not work without it: every request carries a return address, otherwise there is nowhere to send the page. Going online with no address at all is therefore impossible — you can only make websites see somebody else's address instead of yours.

There are two versions. IPv4 looks like four numbers separated by dots (203.0.113.5); there are about four billion of them and they ran out long ago. That is why IPv6 appeared — eight groups separated by colons (2001:db8::1), a supply that is effectively inexhaustible. Many connections today run on both versions at once, and for leak testing that is the key point: both protocols need to be covered.

What an IP reveals — and what it does not

An address gives away the country, usually the city or region, and the autonomous system — the provider or hosting company the range belongs to. That is enough for a site to show local currency, apply regional restrictions or flag a sign-in from an unusual country.

What an address cannot reveal is your name, phone number or exact street and apartment. Only your provider holds that, and it is disclosed on an official request. Everything else a site knows about you — cookies, your account, a set of technical parameters — comes from the browser, not from the address.

Why the city is often wrong

The range-to-place database is assembled from provider data and indirect signals, not from satellites. One provider may serve several regions from a single range, and mobile operators often route subscribers through a gateway in a large city — then everyone around you appears at one point hundreds of kilometres away.

A separate cause is CGNAT: to save scarce IPv4 addresses, an operator sends hundreds of subscribers out through one external address. Your own address on such a network starts with 100.64 and never leaves the operator. Treat the country as reliable and the city as approximate.

How to change the address websites see

The simplest move is rebooting the router: most home connections use a dynamic address that changes with a new session. But the new address comes from the same range of the same provider, so the country and city stay the same.

If you need websites to see a different country and not your provider, traffic is routed through a VPN server: the connection is encrypted and the server's address becomes your external one. The important detail is that every protocol has to be redirected at once, otherwise part of the traffic goes out directly. That is exactly what the leak test checks.

Frequently asked questions