- What Can Happen If Someone Has Your Ip Address
- What To Do If Someone Knows Your Ip Address
- What If Someone Has Your Ip Address
- What To Do If Someone Has Your Ip Address
Using your smartphone to access the Internet, and send emails, visit sites or log into social media accounts is a common thing these days, but what about privacy? Can someone trace your cell phone IP address? And if yes, what you can do to protect yourself and hide your real IP? Or at least is there any way to prevent that data from letting others identifying the person behind or maybe locating where he or she lives?
If you are assigned the same IP address, contact your ISP to request a different IP address. An IP address is your address on the internet, and it's where the hacker can find you. If a hacker's malware was connecting to your computer by its IP address, a new IP is the equivalent of moving to a new address and not leaving a forwarding address. What happens if someone gets your IP address? They could use your IP address in a number of unscrupulous ways. Cyber miscreants could download illegal content like pornography, pirated movies, or even content that is dangerous for national security, using the identity of your IP address. If your network is configured to use dynamic IP addresses (DHCP), it should not have an IP address conflict. If you still see a network IP conflict after an initial system reboot, contact a system administrator.
Mobile phones and IP tracking
Technically speaking, when you access the Internet using your cell phone, you get an assigned IP address that can be unique or randomly changed by the service provider depending on the nature of the user's connection. So, when you use a static IP address like many other cases at home, you left a trace about the IP in your emails or whatever you do online, in this case, yes, your cell phone IP can be traced and even, located exactly or approximately on the map if someone has advanced technologies and network algorithms.
On the other side, it's very hard or even impossible for someone to know your real IP address when using WiFi networks. That's because every time you connect using a WiFi, your smartphone uses a different IP that other users have used before, so, which device has used that IP in reality? Do you see?
It's not easy and even hard to achieve that level of conclusion even after an investigation. However, if you use Bluetooth, then, that will increase the risk of intercepting your data and in that case, the IP could be also intercepted and identified.
Now, if you think that you send a message on Facebook, for example, using your home connection, then, you shared your real IP address that can be located and traced. That's valid only, of course, if the ISP is assigning unique IP to your home network and router.
In addition, when using the ISP mobile connection, you get an IP address that changes every time you connect and reconnect. Consequently, it's not possible to have the same IP address every time you use the Internet, it's unlike home internet connection use where you have a static IP for everything as devices.
The modern home-connected devices use different IPs unless you ask for a static one, or you configured your own static IP. Meanwhile, it's recommended to test your IP on Google, then, disconnect and reconnect a few times to see if it changes or not. If you get the same IP, then, it's fixed and in that case, a VPN is highly recommended to protect your privacy as anyone can see your location, etc …through that unchanged IP.
How to protect your cell phone IP?
The best IP protection solution that I recommend is using a premium VPN service, and from what I tested NordVPN is the best one with global locations including the US, sophisticated server protection, and accreted internet connection which will same time bandwidth by compressing the data and encrypts everything the user ned and receive to his phone or laptop
Unlike the free VPN solutions, that's well protected and used by professionals just like anyone else who access websites and social networks. In fact, free VPN options may look working in the first use, but what they do is slowing down your connection more than protecting it. They use overloaded servers and even with a lower level of protection compared to the paid ones.
The VPN WiFi protection feature encrypts the connection between your cell phone and the website you use or visit. That way, even if someone succeeds in identifying the IP you used, he will only get the VPN server IP and not yours. It's like a firewall that forward requests to their VPN network and not the real one. That's the ideal way to use the Internet from iPhone or Android devices and stay protected without being identified or traced by sharing data about the IP or location.
Unlike the free VPN solutions, that's well protected and used by professionals just like anyone else who access websites and social networks. In fact, free VPN options may look working in the first use, but what they do is slowing down your connection more than protecting it. They use overloaded servers and even with a lower level of protection compared to the paid ones.
The VPN WiFi protection feature encrypts the connection between your cell phone and the website you use or visit. That way, even if someone succeeds in identifying the IP you used, he will only get the VPN server IP and not yours. It's like a firewall that forward requests to their VPN network and not the real one. That's the ideal way to use the Internet from iPhone or Android devices and stay protected without being identified or traced by sharing data about the IP or location.
We've encountered a wide range of questions and assumptions about what information you can find regarding an IP address. We decided to go ahead and create a detailed guide on the IP address information overview.
IP Address basics
At its core, an IP address is quite similar to a physical street address. It allows other devices to identify and connect to the device at the IP address. Perhaps without you realizing it, your web browser has connected to multiple IP addresses in order for you to read this post and you are using multiple IP addresses yourself.
Types of IP Addresses
IPv4 vs IPv6 Addresses
When most of us starting connecting to this amazing thing we call the Internet, we were all using IPv4 addresses. An IPv4 address looks something like 216.239.32.21
and there are 4,294,967,296 (2^32) addresses in total. When originally deployed in 1983, it was assumed that 4.2 billion IP addresses would be more than sufficient for us to use. Turn the clock to 2020 and we've exhausted all 4.2 billion IPv4 addresses.
Starting in the late 1990s, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) began addressing the impending IPv4 address exhaustion and created IPv6. While your typical IPv4 address looks like 216.239.32.21
, an IPv6 address looks like 2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:ff00:0042:8329
. The biggest and most important difference is that IPv6 allows us to go from 4.2 billion addresses to 340,300,...,000 (2^128) addresses. In case you were wondering, that's called 340 Undecillion.
What Can Happen If Someone Has Your Ip Address
While IPv6 should allow for every single internet-connected device its own IP address for the foreseeable future, IPv6 and IPv4 are not compatible so the adoption has been slower than IETF and others had hoped for. We could do an entire post on that alone.
Dynamic vs Static IP Addresses
Because the transition to IPv6 has been slow, most of us are using dynamic IP addresses. This means that your phone, router, etc may have its IP address changed periodically. When this happens you don't even notice. Unless you're hosting a server this doesn't impact you. If you stumbled upon this because you are hosting a server and your dynamic IP address makes it hard for people to connect to you, check out a Dynamic DNS service such as noip.com
Some people (and typically businesses) have what's called a static IP address. While a dynamic IP address may change, a static IP address does not. The pros and cons of a dynamic vs static IP address are another topic we could make an entire post on.
Public vs Private IP Addresses
While most IP addresses are public, meaning that people from all over the world can connect to it (just like you connected to a number of IP addresses to read this post), there are some ranges that have been set aside for private use. The best example is if you have a router you connect your phone or computer to. The private IP ranges for IPv4 are:
10.0.0.0 – 10.255.255.255
172.16.0.0 – 172.31.255.255
192.168.0.0 – 192.168.255.255
If you have a router, you can have 192.168.1.1
and I can have the same address.
Full IP address information
The reason that our amazing customers use IPinfo is because of the incredible information you can learn about a single IP address. Using our basic service, I looked up my IP address as I was writing this at Starbucks (Trenta water with either a Grande Americano or Grande Caramel Machiatto in case you're wondering) and this is what our services at IPinfo provided:
The Basics - Geolocation
Most of this information is straight forward, I want to make note that if you look up the latitude/longitude listed, you won't find a Starbucks on the map. Why is that? IP address geolocation is aimed at city or postal code level, not at the exact physical location.
ASN API
With an ASN you can learn when it was allocated ownership of the IP, how many IPs they own, their main domain, business name, and what type of entity they are.
Hosting Data
More information about who is hosting/providing this IP address
Company Data
Exactly what you think it is
Privacy API
This service allows you to learn whether or not the IP address in question is likely coming from a provider that is providing privacy services to the actual end user. IP address: 43.241.71.120
Abuse Contact API
Is this API address engaging in some type of abuse, such as hacking, hosting copyrighted material, etc? You can quickly find out who to contact to report this behavior.
Common Questions on IP Information
What To Do If Someone Knows Your Ip Address
The most common questions we see around learning about an IP address are:
Q: How do I look up information on a specific IP address?
A: That's exactly what IPinfo is all about. Once you create an account, you can use our web-based tool in your account at https://ipinfo.io/account. Simply type in the IP address and we'll take care of the rest.
Q: How someone can use IP address information? What can someone do with your IP address?
A: We have amazing customers doing some incredible things with this information, from providing geo-specific content to security research to learning more about their customers and habits based on location.
What If Someone Has Your Ip Address
Q: Can I track the physical location of my phone or an individual person based on their IP address?
A: In short, no, not really. You can get a general idea of where your phone is, but to track it down to the table it is sitting on is not really feasible. For those of you like myself who value privacy, this should come as a relief.
What To Do If Someone Has Your Ip Address
If you have more questions regarding IP address information, we'd love to hear there. We are constantly learning and developing incredible tools to help our customers makes the most of the Internet and the data out there. We'd love to see what ideas you have.