An IP address location  is a number that connects your computer, phone or tablet to the internet and allows devices on different networks to communicate with each other. It’s one of the brilliant inventions that makes the world wide web so amazing and useful.

If you’re using a home network, your device’s local IP address is private and is only visible to devices connected to the same network. You might need to know your local IP address if you’re tinkering with a home server or troubleshooting printing issues. But if you use public Wi-Fi, your device’s public IP address can reveal a lot about where you are located in the world, which can be very helpful to companies, hackers and even advertisers who can track your digital breadcrumbs left by everything you do online.

Navigating the IP Landscape: Unveiling Strategies and Tools for Effective Intellectual Property Search

While your local IP address doesn’t reveal your name or home address, your public IP can tell anyone who knows how to look for it your general location based on information that’s readily available through geolocation databases. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does open up your location to a lot of people and can make you more susceptible to hackers and ads that can be pretty annoying.

Fortunately, there are ways to find your public IP address on any device that can connect to the internet. On Windows PCs, you can launch a command prompt by searching for it in the Start menu, while on Mac, you can find a Terminal application in the Utilities folder or launch it from the spotlight search.