So, you think your IP Address is not known to the public on the internet, you are not quite 100% correct. There are ways people on the internet and people who intend to do so can capture your IP address if they have some technical knowledge. Your Internet Service Provider is not the only one who knows your IP Address.
Government institutions, public companies, smart techies, and your neighbors with a little technical knowledge in the field can unmask your IP address. Believe me, this can happen to you without your knowledge and consent. They do it for different purposes altogether and utilize different methodologies.
Let’s try and understand why it happens.
Why would they Spy on your IP Address?
Google spies on you when you use their services as it recommends you keep your location services active. One of the reasons why it happens is because they want to bombard you with products and services that are relevant to your location. Secondly, if you want to use their Google map service the application needs to know your current location to guide you to your destination.
When you visit a website or click on an advertisement these businesses will capture your IP address as they want to know your geographical location in terms of your state and country. This is because they want to create a user profile for you depending on your online behavior. This online behavior profile will help these businesses again to bombard you with targeted advertisements. Furthermore, these companies can block you if they perceive you to be a threat or don’t want to access their services in your region.
In some countries, law enforcement agencies would like to spy on you. They do it by tracking down your IP Address and asking your ISP to provide your home address and phone numbers. Law enforcement agencies would even have the power to hack into your emails.
Let’s have a look at 7 popular ways the public can spy on your IP Address
- If a friend or neighbour borrows your laptop or mobile device, they can know your IP Address simply by typing “What is my IP Address” on Google.
- Someone in the vicinity of your local wireless network can hack into your local network and access your IP Address. Alternatively, if you allow your friends to use a Guest Wi-Fi network, they can also trap your IP Address.
- Sending you a link or image through email, WhatsApp or Facebook. HTML code could be embedded in an image which is sent to you through WhatsApp or email. When you click on that image your IP Address will be tapped by the sender. There are online tools such as https://grabify.link/ which can be used to send you a link to a webpage. When you click on this link it will uncover your IP Address to the sender.
- When you visit a website online. The website grabs your IP Address because that serves as your identity over internet. They do it to find if you are repeat visitor or a unique visitor to them. This data is used in Data Analytics that businesses use to check their performance.
- Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter also tap into your IP Address. You cannot see IP Address of your social links, but the administrators of these websites do have access to these logs used by all social media consumers.
- When you send an email to someone. By looking deeper into your email headers techniques can identify your IP Address and location.
- Bloggers who run websites can trace your IP Address when you put comments on their blogs
You can evade unmasking of your IP Address
So, you saw how vulnerable you are when you are online in terms of your IP Address being traced back to you. You can certainly avoid it by using a Virtual Private Network or alternatively known as a VPN. VPN can make sure that spies won’t be able to track down your actual IP Address and your location. VPN is an affordable, easy to use service which will mask your IP Address and will route your online activity with another borrowed IP Address
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