IP address – ever stumbled upon this term? Perhaps you’ve spotted it in your computer settings or received an email warning about a login from an unknown IP address. Let’s make sense of this internet jargon and explore why it matters to you.

If you’ve ever been asked “what is your IP address”, or just wondered “what is my IP address”, here’s an easy way to find out. And if you are now wondering “what is an IP address”, we explain that too!

It can be a pretty scary thing to log into your Gmail account and be met with a blazing red banner that says “Warning: We believe your account was recently accessed from:” followed by a geographic location that you decidedly aren’t, often a place such as Russia, Poland or China, and that followed by the options “Show details and preferences” and “Ignore”. Usually you can be certain that at that moment, the first thing you need to do is change your password, because your account was almost certainly hacked or otherwise compromised. However, that’s not always true if you get a warning of a remote access in the U.S., such as “We believe your account was recently accessed from: United States (CA).”

A German court has ruled that an IP address is not afforded the same privacy protections that Internet users enjoy for their names and other personally identifying information, even though a user may have a static IP address which is directly linked to the user alone.