Produced for ExpressVPN and originally uploaded to YouTube on February 15th, 2023.
What is an IP address, and how does it affect your privacy?
An IP address is a number, and it usually looks like this: 4 smaller numbers representing 4 bytes of information, or 32 bits.
Devices need IP addresses to communicate with each other over a network, just like people need physical addresses to mail each other letters.
On your home Wi-Fi network, for example, each device has a private IP address. This number is only unique within the private network. Routers tend to reuse the same numbers, so these numbers aren’t globally unique.
On the wider internet, however, each device has a public IP address, and that number is unique.
Because it is unique to the whole internet, your public IP address is a very powerful tool for companies to gather information about you.
For example, websites can use your IP address to identify your geographical location, sometimes down to the neighborhood.
Marketers can also use your IP address to track your activity across the internet. They can see what you’re interested in, what you’re spending money on, and even make accurate predictions about what you’ll do in the future.
Even worse, these companies can take the information tied to your IP address and sell it to other third parties—all without your consent.
That’s why many people choose to mask their IP addresses, by connecting to the internet through a VPN service like ExpressVPN.
ExpressVPN reroutes your traffic through a secure server with a different IP address in a location you choose.
Instead of your true IP address, websites and other third parties will see the IP address of the VPN server, which is shared by thousands of other users and keeps no logs of any browsing activity.
You can check what IP address you’re using by visiting ExpressVPN’s IP Address Checker at www.expressvpn.com/what-is-my-ip