Can a website identify me when I visit?
Hi everyone, Leo Notenboom here for AskLeo.com. Identify yourself to me.
Join my newsletter, Confident Computing,
for weekly tips, tricks, and updated information in your inbox.
Every Tuesday visit
askleo.com/newsletter For more information and to sign up.
So the question, of course, is this.
When I visit a website, are they able to identify my IP address?
If so, how can I block them from being able to identify me?
You're basically asking two different questions.
Can a website identify your IP address? Absolutely.
It's part of the protocol that allows them
to know as the website to know where to send the information you're asking when
you're asking them to send you a page to display on your screen.
Can the IP address identify you?
Not really.
So let's talk about IP addresses for a minute.
If you go to the article that this video is based on, askleo.com/2237.
You'll see that the article will show you what your IP address is.
The IP address is the address
of the device you have connected to the Internet.
Which means that if you've only got one computer no router, no nothing else,
then it's probably the IP address of your computer.
More commonly, it's the address of your router, which means it's not really
identifying even a specific computer at your location.
It's just your router at your location known only to your ISP.
In other words, it doesn't really tell anybody where you're at.
You can use location services, and they'll give you a rough idea.
But sometimes the rough idea can be only
as close as your neighborhood, sometimes as close as your state or province.
And I've seen it be as wrong as being in a completely different country.
So it's not something that anybody can
rely on in terms of identifying who you are, where you are, or anything like that.
But it is fundamental to how information gets transmitted around the Internet.
Like I said, when the server you've asked
for a page, they need to know where to send that information.
That information is your IP address.
So if the IP address isn't you, but you still want to obscure it?
Well, there are essentially two different ways to do that.
They both boil down to the same thing,
and they boil down to routing your connection through another service.
The simple solution is a VPN or virtual private network.
Your connection doesn't actually go directly to the server at the other end.
Your connection goes through this middle
layer that hides your IP address, replacing it with their own.
So when I connect to a machine,
for example, through my VPN, this machine sees the VPN IP address and not my own.
That's one way to do it.
One of the problems, of course, is that VPNs are often blocked because
they're often used as ways to appear that you're coming from a different
country, which some countries, some services, some providers just don't like.
But the bottom line is that's one way to, quote, unquote, hide your IP address.
The other is to use a service like Tor.
TOR The onion router is essentially
the same kind of a thing, except that the path your information
takes is obscured through multiple different layers of encrypted connections.
So that not only do you appear as
a different IP address when you finally reach the site you're going to,
but there's no way to trace where that connection came from.
The information is still able to be returned to you because it's going through
multiple layers of secured encryption along the way.
But there's no way to expose from the start or from the finish exactly
where that information is ultimately destined.
It's complicated, and because it's complicated, it's actually slow.
Tor is great if you need absolute
security Privacy that you know you're not going to expose your IP address.
But it does come with that cost.
It is because you're going through multiple layers.
It requires a dedicated browser, requires more time just to do what it
does, and it may not even solve the problem.
Neither of these two things may solve the problem.
Here's the real problem.
You and I tell all these sites who we are over and over and over again.
For example, any site that you log into knows who you are.
By definition, logging in says, yes, this is me.
You're presenting some kind of credential that is associated with you personally.
Consider, for example, how much information we post to social media.
All of that information could potentially be cross referenced with all of the other
places that we've signed in to somehow get a pretty reasonable picture of who we are.
We hear about it all the time.
People get exposed, their identities get exposed.
Sometimes they get docked by individuals who use some of these data aggregation
scenarios to narrow down exactly who you could possibly be.
Part of that information might very well
be an IP address or a consistent IP address across multiple services.
For example, say you visit a site that requires you to log in,
so maybe they keep a log of who you are when you logged in and your IP address.
Now you go to another site,
a site that you don't want to expose your location to, your IP address to.
But it's required in order for the connection to even work.
So you go to that site, they know your IP address.
If those two sites happen to cross reference their information,
the second site can find out who you are by virtue of the first site.
Knowing who you are, it gets complicated very quickly.
It's a lot of data,
but what are all of these Internet sites and services collecting?
Tons and tons and tons of data.
So it is very difficult to absolutely
not be truly, completely identified on the Internet.
Now, a lot of this is for people that have true concerns and needs.
One of my very common statements is that you and I were just not that interesting.
Nobody cares that you visited this site and then visited that site.
Nobody cares that I visited this site or that site.
But if at some point you break a law or you do something that gets the authority's
attention, then all of this data that is cross referenceable
could potentially be used to identify who you are, regardless of where you go.
Now, that's where people who are in such
situations that I'm thinking of maybe embedded reporters or whistleblowers.
They need to use services like VPNs, end,
Tor and encrypted email and other scenarios that truly work to protect
their identity, their location and pretty much everything else.
But the average person
you and I honestly, I'm sorry nobody wants
to hear this, but you and I just aren't that interesting.
We're interesting as groups advertisers
love to know what large groups of 67 odd year old adult males are interested in.
So in that part, yeah, my data is probably part of that cohort of data.
But in terms of what does Leo note and boom actually do, nobody cares.
They really don't advertisers don't care.
The sites don't care.
They just care what middle aged men do so that they can sell the kinds of things
to middle aged men that middle aged men are likely to buy.
So that's kind of sort of the bottom line
here is that the IP address, it's part of the protocol.
There are ways to hide it.
They're probably kind of painful and kind of slow.
And in large part,
we give away our information so often and so freely that it's really not
that difficult at times to correlate cross reference all of that information and come
up with an identity that may in fact be you.
But in most cases, it just doesn't matter.
Nobody's actually doing that.
You and I just aren't that important. For updates.
For related links, for comments and more or visit askleo.com/2237. I'm Leo Notenboom
and this is AskLeo.com. Thanks for watching.