Guides

Short guides to what websites see about your connection, and what you can do about it.

• What websites can see about you

  Your IP and its network, operating system, browser, DNS server, WebRTC, time zone and distance: what a site learns on a visit before you click anything.

• How websites detect VPNs

  How websites detect a VPN: data center addresses, lists that name the VPN, and the leaks that give a tunnel away. And what to do when you are blocked.

• How to choose a proxy provider

  Datacenter, ISP, residential and mobile proxies compared by what a website sees, and an eight-step test to run on a trial before you pay for volume.

• IP fraud scores explained

  What an IP fraud score measures at IPQS, MaxMind, IP2Location, Scamalytics, ProxyCheck and IPGeolocation, their ranges and levels, and why they disagree.

• How IP geolocation works, and why it gets your location wrong

  IP geolocation is a database lookup, not GPS. Where the data comes from, why your location can be far off, and how to get a wrong location fixed.