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Showing you your own public IP address means something has to observe it. Every service that can do that necessarily sees the address we would be reporting, so which one we use is a decision we have not taken lightly and have not yet taken at all.

Rather than quietly sending your connection to a third party we have not vetted, this page stays off until we have. Everything else on the site works without it.

What an IP address is, and is not

Your public IP address is the return address your connection presents to the internet. Every site you visit sees it, because they need somewhere to send the reply. It is usually assigned by your provider and shared with other customers, and it often changes without you noticing.

It identifies a connection, not a person. It is coarse: it can usually place you in a region and name your provider, and it is frequently wrong about anything finer than that — particularly on mobile, where an address may be shared by thousands of people and appear to be in a different city entirely.

Why we will not tell you whether you are using a VPN

Because nobody can, from an address alone. Services that claim to detect VPNs are checking the address against a list of ranges known to belong to hosting providers. Those lists miss new servers, and they flag a great deal that is not a VPN at all — university networks, corporate connections and mobile carrier equipment.

So the most we will ever say is that a connection may be using a VPN or proxy. What we can report honestly is change: if you check, switch something, and check again, we can tell you the address is different.

What happens to your address

Nothing is stored. The result is displayed and held in your browser for the length of your visit so a second check can be compared against the first, and it goes no further. We keep no log of it.