However, unlike with public IP addresses, the devices in your home can have the exact same private IP addresses as your neighbor's devices, or anyone else's all around the world. This is because private addresses are non-routable — hardware devices on the internet are programmed to prevent devices with a private IP address from communicating directly with any other IP beyond the router that they're connected to. Because these private addresses are restrained from reaching the internet, you need an address that can reach the rest of the world, which is why a public IP address is needed. This type of setup enables all the devices in your home network to relay information back and forth between your router and ISP using just a single address a public IP address. Another way to look at this is to think of the router in your home as your own Internet Service Provider. While your router serves out private IP addresses to the devices privately connected behind your router, your ISP delivers public IP addresses to the devices that are publicly connected to the internet. When you try opening a website from your computer, the request is sent from your computer to your router as a private IP address, after which your router requests the website from your ISP using the public IP address assigned to your network. Once the request has been made, the operations are reversed — the ISP sends the address of the website to your router, which forwards the address to the computer that asked for it. The most basic example would be when you're using a. Home networks, on the other hand, almost always are assigned dynamic IP addresses for the opposite reason. If an ISP gave your network an unchanging address, it may be more likely to be abused by customers who are hosting websites from home, or by hackers who can try the same IP address over and over until they breach your network. For example, if you were to move to a new location a few miles away, but use the same ISP, having a dynamic IP address assignment would simply mean that you'd get another IP address that's available from the pool of addresses. Networks using static addresses would have to be re-configured to apply to their new location. You can't hide your public IP address from your ISP because all of your traffic has to move through them before reaching anything else on the internet. However, you can hide your IP address from the websites you visit, as well as encrypt all of the data transfers thus hiding traffic from your ISP , by first filtering all your data through a VPN. Say, for example, that you wanted your IP address to be hidden from Google. Normally, when accessing Google's website, they would be able to see that your specific public IP address has requested to view their website. Doing a quick search on one of the IP finding websites from above would tell them who your ISP is. Since your ISP knows which IP addresses have been assigned to you, specifically, would mean that your visit to Google could be pinned directly to you. At this point, your anonymity hinges on whether the VPN service is willing to give up your IP address, which of course reveals your identity. The difference between most ISP's and most VPN services is that an ISP is more likely to be required by law to give up who it is that accessed the website, while VPN's sometimes exist in countries that have no such obligation.
