What your IP address reveals

Run your own address through /ip-lookup to see exactly the same fields any website can pull, or open /what-sites-see for the browser side of the picture.

The fields anyone can look up for free

Field	Where it comes from	How reliable
Country	RIR allocation records	Very high, above 99% for fixed lines
City and region	Commercial geolocation databases	Mixed. Right city often, right suburb rarely
ISP name	WHOIS or RDAP registration	High
ASN and AS name	BGP routing table	High. This is routing fact, not inference
Reverse DNS name	The PTR record your ISP publishes	Often exposes the exchange or region
Connection type	Heuristics over ASN and prefix	Good for hosting and mobile, softer for residential
VPN, proxy, Tor flags	Threat-intelligence feeds	Good for known exit nodes, poor for private servers

None of these fields comes from your device. They all come from public registries and routing data attached to the address block.

Why the city is a guess and the ASN is not

Your ASN is published by your ISP in BGP. Every router on the internet needs it to move packets, so it is verifiable fact. City-level location is different. Nobody surveys your address. Geolocation vendors infer it from registration records, from latency measurements, from prefixes ISPs voluntarily publish as geofeeds under RFC 8805, and from where users of their apps happened to be.

That inference breaks in predictable ways:

• Mobile carriers route large regions through a handful of gateways, so a phone in a small town reports the nearest big city.
• Satellite and some rural ISPs anchor whole prefixes to a head-end site hundreds of kilometres from any subscriber.
• Corporate VPNs and iCloud Private Relay put you wherever the egress sits.
• A newly reassigned block can carry the previous holder’s location for months.

We label geolocation “approximate” everywhere on this site for that reason. If your result is wrong, it is wrong in the database, not on your device.

What an IP genuinely enables

Someone holding your address can do a short list of real things:

• Estimate your country and ISP, and use that to pick a language, a currency, or a licensing region.
• Block or rate-limit you, which is how most abuse prevention works.
• Scan for services you have exposed. If you forwarded a port to a NAS or a game server, that endpoint is reachable and will get probed within hours.
• Flood your connection with traffic. Denial of service against a residential line is unusual but possible, and the fix is a call to your ISP.
• File an abuse complaint with your ISP, naming the address and a timestamp.

Court-ordered disclosure sits above all of that. Your ISP maps the address plus a timestamp to a subscriber account. That is the only routine path from an IP to a person, and it runs through legal process, not through a lookup tool.

What an IP cannot do

It cannot name you. It cannot give a street address. It cannot read your files, your messages, or your browsing history. It cannot bypass a router that is not accepting inbound connections, which is the default state of every consumer router shipped in the last twenty years.

It also cannot single out one person in a household. Behind NAT, every phone, laptop, console, and doorbell on your network shares one public address. Behind carrier-grade NAT it is shared across households, which is one of the reasons RFC 6269 warns against treating an address as an identity.

The browser gives away far more than the address

An IP address is a coarse identifier. Your browser is a precise one. Screen dimensions, installed fonts, timezone, language list, GPU string, and canvas rendering combine into a fingerprint that stays stable across networks and survives a VPN. Changing your IP does nothing to it.

That is the honest trade-off in any “hide my IP” pitch. Masking the address removes one weak signal and leaves the strong ones untouched. See what your own browser exposes on /browser-info and /http-headers.

Reasonable precautions

• Do not forward ports you do not use, and close old rules on your router.
• Keep router firmware current. Remote administration should be off unless you need it.
• Use a VPN when you are on a network you do not control, or when you want to change the region a site sees. Understand that it moves trust from your ISP to the VPN operator.
• Treat someone who says they “have your IP” as a nuisance rather than a threat. In gaming and chat platforms it is a standard bluff.

If you want to see the whole picture for your current connection, open the full report. Every field there is one an ordinary website can obtain, which is the point of showing it.