Advertisers - not to mention hackers and other cybercriminals - are able to target you because your public IP address reveals a lot about your online activity. The ads you see are often location-specific. Your public IP address can be revealed by pretty much anything you do online: your browsing history, your online purchases, and all the messages you send. Your public IP address is not nearly as secure - it’s visible anytime you visit a web page. You generally need to know only your local IP if you’re tinkering on your home network, like setting up a local gaming server or troubleshooting printing problems. Your local IP address is more secure than your public IP, because it’s invisible to the outside world. Public vs local IP address: which is more secure?

Your local IP is more private - because it can’t be seen outside of your network. Your local IP address is defined by your router, which assigns a unique local IP address to each device on your home network, such as your different computers, phones, tablets, and smart devices. When you enter the address of a website you’d like to visit, your IP address is sent along with that request. It’s how they determine which customer is requesting which website and connect them accordingly. Your public IP address is assigned by your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to your home network.

If you already know the difference between public and private IPs, skip directly to our sections on how to find your public IP and how to find your local IP. Just like the postal service uses your home address to deliver packages, website servers use your IP address (often referred to simply as an “IP”) to send the data you request (like a website you want to visit) to your device.īefore we get into how to find your IP address, it’s important to determine if you’re looking for a public (also called external) or a local (also called internal or private) IP address. IP addresses are also used to identify people. So when you type in googlecom, a Domain Name Service (DNS) translates the request into the string of numbers (IP address) that correspond to where Google resides on the internet: 8.8.8.8.

While people refer to a site like Google by name, computers use a string of numbers to represent that domain.

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