What are the privacy risks of exposing IP adresses?
What are the privacy risks of exposing IP adresses?
They only expose approximate, not precise, locations, so they shouldn't be a risk like GPS that exposes precise locations?
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I'm inclined to think that your IP provides powerful cross-reference potential. Imagine someone either buys the data off of all data brokers out there or a law enforcement agency obtains similar kind of data through warrants, etc. They can cross-reference IPs and time-stamps and determine, that you, Joe Blow, age 35, who works at X, volunteers at Y, and lives at 123 main street, browse for some kind of very embarrassing porn every night. It's a drastic example to illustrate the idea, but I don't think it's far-fetched.
This could be taken further by imagining a wider net: say, a large portion of people who have donated to this political candidate or who work for this company browse for that same embarrassing porn every night.
I'm thinking birds-eye view of potential privacy violations here.
Example: https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/
Mine is blank, not even using VPN (don't need to where I live) just NextDNS and required encrypt/anon mode enabled for torrents.
Wow, I've been busy with a lot of stuff. That I haven't done. The glory of VPN (that doesn't keep logs) is you're behind the noise of anyone else. Sometimes it's better to not be hidden, but be in the crowded plain sight.
There's stuff on there I didn't download... Hundreds of gigs. Eek.
Because of NATting
CG NAT to be precise, unless it's someone else in his house
probably because of CGNAT or torrent trackers reporting fake stuff. Usually when the first seen and last seen equals it's the latter, otherwise it's the former. It's pretty accurate for me..