Someone has my IP address, should I be scared?
No.
Hi, everyone, my name is Leo Notenboom
and this is Askleo.com, this is a question I get frustratingly often.
The problem is that whenever I talk about
IP addressing and whether or not somebody can find you by your IP address or whether
you can find somebody else by their IP address,
I'm suddenly inundated with a number of comments that basically boil down to
somebody told me they have my IP address and now they're threatening me.
Should I be scared? No, no, you should not be scared.
Nobody's going to track you down to your home.
Nobody's going to use your IP address for something nefarious.
It's just not going to happen.
And actually, to be fair, it gets worse.
When you start searching for an answer
to this very question, you'll find a lot of articles
that basically say, oh, my God, yes, you should be scared.
Of course you should be scared.
And by the way, buy our product and you'll be safe.
As you can tell, it's all marketing.
Having your IP address is not a big deal.
Now, I do have to throw out one incredibly huge caveat, and that is.
Yes, you may be able to be traced by your
IP address if and only if law enforcement gets involved.
They are the ones that have the authority
to request the information from your ISP about where you happen to be physically,
otherwise, that information is simply not available.
Now, I say the police, it's also one of these items that varies
dramatically based on what country you live in.
If you live in a what I'll just call an oppressive regime.
It may be easier for them to get
that information than if you live in other countries.
But the bottom line is that
the friend that says he has your IP
address, who says he's now going to hack you,
he can't. He can't get your IP address and do anything with it.
He can't find you.
He can't attack you.
He can't hack you.
It's just not going to happen.
Here's something you ought to know.
When you visit a Web page like the Web
page associated with this article, and if you want to,
it's going to be Askleo.com/133963.
If you visit that page in among the description,
you'll see something where it says, I know your IP address.
You visited my server, part of the information about that visit
includes your IP address, I display it to you right there on the page.
Now, when I visited, it shows me my IP address.
When you visit it, it shows you your IP address.
Sure, I can log that.
I don't care to, but I could.
I could keep that.
Not sure that I would do anything with it because I can't I can't track you down.
I can't attack you.
It's just not something that's going to happen.
So
I immediately get lots of reaction, pushback to this.
But but but all of this information out there says I should be scared.
Most of it's bull.
It is it's trying to sell you products you
don't need. It's trying to sell you VPN services,
which may or may not actually hide your IP address. You're still exposing your IP
address to your ISP and to the VPN service, among other things.
It'll slow you down.
You can use it if you like, but it's probably not necessarily going
to give you the kind of protection you think you need that you really don't.
But but but I'm really special people really are after me.
Ninety nine percent of the people making this claim are absolutely wrong.
There are some terms I'm not going to use,
but the bottom line is that we naturally fear what we don't understand,
why most people don't understand the Internet.
They don't understand how it works so
that anybody that makes what feels like a knowledgeable claim about being able
to do something to you with just your IP address, that's kind of scary.
I'm here to tell you, it shouldn't be you should not be scared about somebody
having your IP address, it's just not going to happen to you now.
If you're that one percent.
Which in a lot of ways is one percent
of one percent, right, it's it's people who really are at risk,
people who have a legitimate concern about being traced by others online.
Maybe they're unlawful.
Maybe they're doing something illegal
that they're concerned about their government tracing them.
There are solutions way more complicated
than I really have time for or have the inclination to talk about here,
because seriously, for ninety nine point nine,
nine percent of the people watching this video, the fact that somebody has your IP
address is not something you need to worry about it.
Now, there is one small possibility,
and in fact, it's the reason I'm not exposing my IP address either.
I'm a target, right?
I mean, somebody would love to say, ha ha, you're wrong, I did caused you a problem.
The problem is this. If somebody has your IP address,
they could mount what's called a denial of service attack.
It doesn't compromise you.
It doesn't expose you.
It doesn't hurt your machine.
It doesn't, you know, somehow gain access to all of your accounts.
It doesn't do any of that.
All it does is prevent you from using the Internet for a while.
I run a business that requires the Internet.
So if somebody wanted to,
quote unquote hurt me, they kind of sort of could it wouldn't last long.
Right.
It would be an annoyance more more than anything else, because, of course,
I'd reach out to my ISP, I'd get a new IP address and boom, it'd be over.
Right. It'd be done.
In your case, your IP address is probably changing all the time anyway, right?
Consumer IP addresses are different
from one connection to the next to each time you connect.
It's not uncommon to get a different IP address.
So the fact that somebody knows your IP
address today probably tells them nothing about where you'll be tomorrow.
It's just not that big a deal.
But there are like I said,
there's this one window where somebody could try and knock you off the Internet.
And that's easily dealt with simply often by rebooting your router or rebooting your
phone or talking to your ISP and saying, hey, you know, such and such is the case.
They're the ones that can stop a denial
of service attack and give you a different IP address to come in from anyway.
Now, the other thing that scares people
a lot about their IP address is that it somehow exposes their location.
One of the articles I mentioned that came up when I searched for this topic myself,
one of the scary ones, because, again, it's trying to sell you services that you
don't need, points you to a different service called What's My IP Address?
What's my IP address? Is it totally legit service?
It is another one of those services that,
like any Web server you visit, can tell you what your IP address is.
So I went out there and sure enough, it gives me my IP address.
When you visit, what's my IP address?
Like any other service on the Internet, it knows your IP address.
Its job is to show it to you just so
that you know what IP address you're coming up.
However, they also show you what's called geo location,
where they take your IP address and try to tell you where you are,
geolocation is notoriously and I mean notoriously inaccurate.
My IP address, for example, they actually now have it down to my city
or a region in my city, not even a neighborhood.
A neighborhood is much smaller.
It's a larger area within my city. I live in Woodinville,
in the area that they notice is called Cottage Lake Great,
dozens of square miles, thousands of people.
You're not going to find me just
by knowing that I'm in Cottage Lake, Washington.
Often they're off by much, much more.
Depending on the service that's being used to geo locate you.
They could be off by miles as they are.
In my case, they could be off by dozens of miles.
I've been located in Seattle, which is a dozen miles away.
They could be off by hundreds of miles.
In the years past, I've been located as being in Portland,
which is 250 miles to myself, just not something to worry about.
But
when you visit what's my IP address,
they ask you to I'll say what they call update my IP location.
If you click on that, you will notice that your browser asks you
to allow it to share your location with this site.
Your browser absolutely knows where you are.
Your computer knows where you are, your phone knows where you are.
There are a number of different ways that they know, but they know with a much
higher degree of accuracy exactly where you are.
And sure enough, when I allowed it to update my location
and I told my browser, yes, go ahead and give it the information,
it located my house.
In fact, it's probably close enough
to actually locate the room in my house where I happened to be.
But you know what?
That had nothing to do with my IP address.
The IP address wasn't involved in that calculation.
It wasn't involved in locating me, my browser was.
I let the browser tell somebody else where I was.
If you're concerned about location,
don't do that and realize that it's not based on your IP address.
That kind of fine granular location doesn't come from your IP address.
It comes from many other things,
many other sources, including GPS, Wi-Fi networks and probably some other things.
But it's not your IP address.
And the fact that somebody has your IP
address doesn't get them that close to you.
I hope that's helpful.
I know that a lot of people get concerned by this.
I know that a lot of people almost panic
when they're told that, hey, I've got your I.P. address, I'm going to do something.
They're not.
For updates, for related links,
for your IP address, for some examples and a little bit more
detail, visit Askleo.com/133963.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is Askleo.com.Thanks for watching.