Who am I on the internet?
Every time you open a page, the site on the other end receives some information about you without having to ask. This page shows you what it is, because knowing what is already visible is the first step in deciding what to hide.
IP address: the number identifying your connection while you are online, rather like a phone number handed out by your provider. ISP (Internet Service Provider): whoever sells you the connection. IPv4 and IPv6: the two generations of addresses. The first ran out years ago, the second are far more numerous and are recognisable because they contain colons. VPN (Virtual Private Network): a service that makes your traffic leave from somewhere else on the network, so it changes what you see on this page.
- IP address
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- Version
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- Provider
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- Where they see you from
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- Protocol
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- Encryption
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- Cloudflare node
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- Languages you ask for
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I could not read the data. That can happen if a browser extension blocks the request: try again, or turn it off for a moment.
What each line means
The IP address is the one your provider has assigned to you right now. On almost every home line it changes from time to time, and on mobile networks it changes often and is shared among many people at once. It is not a name, but it is the thread that lets a site tell that two visits come from the same place, and your provider knows who it was assigned to at any given moment.
The version tells you whether this page reached you by the old road, IPv4, or the new one, IPv6. Seeing IPv6 means your provider has it switched on and your device prefers it. Seeing IPv4 does not mean you have no IPv6: it only means IPv4 was used for this page.
The provider is the technical name your network is registered under in the address system, with a number beside it called an ASN. Sometimes it is the commercial name you know, sometimes an internal code, and in some cases the name of a VPN service: that is the quickest check for whether a VPN is actually working.
The line about where they see you from is a geographic estimate drawn from the address, not from your device's GPS. It usually gets the country right and often gets the city wrong, because it shows where your provider hands traffic off to the internet, which can be hundreds of kilometres from your home. When a site speaks to you in the wrong language, or says a programme is not available in your country, this is the line it is looking at.
Protocol and encryption describe the technical conversation with the site: HTTP/3 and TLS 1.3 are the most recent versions, designed to waste fewer round trips when opening the connection. How much you notice then depends on the network, the server and what you are loading, so seeing them here does not mean that page is fast. The Cloudflare node is the city this site is answering you from, chosen by where you are. The last line is the languages your browser declares it prefers: it is why so many sites know which language to use without you choosing anything.
What this page does not know
This page shows only what arrives along with the request. It does not know your name, it does not know what device you are holding beyond what the browser declares, and it does not know what other tabs you have open. It does not even know whether what you see is really your home address or that of an office network, a hotel or a VPN: from the outside they are indistinguishable.
And it stores nothing. The data you read is taken from the request and sent straight back to you, without going through any archive. The site's visit counting is separate, uses no cookies and records no addresses: it is explained in the privacy policy.
How to use it to check a VPN
- Open this page with the VPN switched off and note the address, the provider and the city.
- Switch the VPN on and pick the country you want.
- Come back here and press Refresh.
- If address, provider and country have all changed, that is good evidence that this request is going through the VPN. If only the country changed but the provider is still yours, something is wrong.
What you see here concerns one request, the one this page has just made. It is strong evidence, not proof that all your traffic goes through the VPN: other apps can take different routes, so can the system's own network services, and this check also leaves out DNS leaks and the requests some browser features make on their own. This page answers one precise question, not all of them.