Can Someone Track You by Your IP Address?

Short answer: someone can learn roughly where you are and who your internet provider is, but they cannot find your name or home address from your IP address alone. Here is what is and is not possible.

What an IP address reveals

• Your internet provider and the network it belongs to.
• Your approximate location, usually the country, and often the city or region. Accuracy varies, and it frequently points to your provider's regional hub instead of your house.
• Your connection type, such as residential, mobile or a data center.

You can see exactly what others see by using our IP lookup on your own address.

What it does not reveal

• Your name, email or phone number.
• Your street address.
• The websites you visit, or the content of your traffic.

Only your internet provider knows which customer had a given address at a given time, and it releases that information to authorities with proper legal process, not to the public.

How people get your IP address

Any website, server or peer you connect to sees your address. Common ways it is collected include visiting a site, joining a game lobby or voice chat, using peer-to-peer file sharing, and clicking a link to a page controlled by someone else. Email normally does not expose your address to the recipient if you use a large webmail provider, but some mail systems include it in message headers.

What an attacker can do with it

• Flood your connection with traffic (a denial-of-service attack), most often seen in online gaming disputes.
• Probe for open ports and exposed services such as remote desktop or cameras.
• Geolocate you roughly, or block you from a service.

Having your address does not let someone read your files or take over your computer. That requires a weakness such as an exposed service or a phishing success.

How to protect yourself

1. Hide your address from the sites you visit with a reputable VPN or another method from how to hide your IP address.
2. Keep your router firmware and devices updated and do not expose services you do not need. Check what is open with our port checker.
3. Avoid clicking links from strangers, especially in games and chats.
4. If your address is being attacked, ask your provider to change it.
5. Test for WebRTC leaks, which can expose your real address behind a VPN.