Find out if your VPN leaks your IP address
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are used for a variety of purposes. Common reasons include protecting one's privacy on the Internet, improving the security of the Internet connection, bypassing censorships and blocks, and using it for business purposes.
If you use a VPN for privacy, regardless of whether that is your main reason for using it or just a nice addition, you may want to make sure that your "real" IP address is not leaked when you are connected to the VPN.
The reason for this is simple: there is no privacy if the device IP leaks.
The IP address links back to you directly. While a court order is usually required to link the IP to a name, it alone can reveal information such as the country and region you are connecting to directly.
Find out if your VPN leaks your IP address
It is suggested to verify that a VPN connection does not leak IP address information. I suggest you do so on every connect, but at least the first time you connect to it and maybe occasionally afterwards as well.
There are plenty of sites out there that you can use for the purpose. Good news is that you only need to load one of them to find out whether your VPN leaks information.
The site that I use frequently is IP Leak. You find other sites for that purpose listed on our privacy test resource listing.
Note: It is recommended that you disable any script blocker (including ad-blockers) when you run the test as they may block scripts from running on the site that are required to give you an accurate reading.
All you need to do is connect to the site, and wait for it to display the results of its analysis. This should not take longer than a couple of seconds.
IP Leak tests the following:
- The IPv4 IP address.
- The IPv6 IP address.
- Whether WebRTC leaks the IP address.
- Whether DNS leaks the IP address.
- Whether a proxy is used (if not transparent).
- Torrent address detection.
- Geolocation detection.
- Look up of the IP address that reveals Tor and AirVPN use, ISP, organization, country, and more using public databases.
- User agent and system information.
If you see different IP addresses or locations, say the correct one for the IPv4 IP address, and another for the IPv6 IP address, then there is a chance that third-parties that you connect to see both IP addresses as well.
You may want to make sure that the IP address and the country that IP Leaks displays after the test matches the VPN Provider's network.
Closing Words
It is highly recommended to run tests regularly to find out if your VPN connection leaks your IP address. While you may not want to do so on each connect, I recommend you do so at least on first connect, on every software update, and every now and then in between.
If you notice a leak, you may want to plug it before you start using the VPN. How that is done depends largely on the leak and the client you use to connect to the VPN.
Some VPN providers provide leak protection options in the VPN clients that they provide their customers with.
Now You: Talking about VPNs: which do you use and why?
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.