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Jan 1, 0001

Privacy Policy

Last updated: April 5, 2026

Look, we know nobody reads privacy policies. They’re usually 4,000 words of legalese designed to give a company permission to do whatever they want with your data while technically disclosing it in paragraph 47 of a document nobody will ever scroll to. We’re going to try something different here.

This privacy policy is written in plain language. We’ll tell you what we collect, why, and what we do with it. If something is worth worrying about, we’ll say so. If something is genuinely harmless, we’ll explain why.

The Short Version

whatismyip.wiki is a static HTML website. We don’t use analytics. We don’t set cookies. We don’t run advertising. We don’t have user accounts. We don’t have a database of user information because there’s nothing to put in one. When you visit our site, your browser downloads some HTML, CSS, fonts, and maybe a tiny JavaScript file for search. That’s it.

If that’s enough for you, cool, you’re done. The rest of this page exists because privacy regulations require us to be thorough, and because we think transparency is worth the effort even when there’s genuinely nothing sketchy to disclose.

What We Collect

Server Logs

Like literally every website on the internet, our web server (Nginx) writes access logs. When you visit a page, a log entry is created that includes:

  • Your IP address
  • The date and time of the request
  • The page you requested
  • The HTTP status code (200 for success, 404 for not found, etc.)
  • Your browser’s User-Agent string (like “Mozilla/5.0 … Chrome/120”)
  • The referring page (if you clicked a link from another site)

These logs exist on our server for operational purposes: monitoring traffic, debugging errors, detecting attacks, and making sure the site is working properly. We don’t analyze them for marketing insights. We don’t build user profiles from them. We don’t share them with anyone.

Server logs are automatically rotated and older logs are periodically deleted. We don’t archive them long-term or export them to any analytics platform.

Can we identify you from server logs? Your IP address is in there, and technically your ISP knows which customer had that IP at that time. But we’re not going to contact your ISP and ask, because why would we? We have literally no reason to identify individual visitors. If law enforcement showed up with a valid court order requesting logs for a specific time period (which has never happened and we hope never will), we’d comply as legally required, but that’s no different from any website you’ve ever visited.

Cookies

We don’t set any. Zero. None. You can verify this by opening your browser’s developer tools, going to the Application or Storage tab, and checking for cookies from whatismyip.wiki. You’ll find an empty list.

We don’t use analytics cookies, advertising cookies, session cookies, or tracking cookies. We don’t use cookie banners because we don’t use cookies. Refreshing, isn’t it?

JavaScript and Tracking

Our site loads a tiny JavaScript file for the search feature. It fetches a JSON index of our articles and performs search locally in your browser. No data is sent to our server or any third party when you use search. The search happens entirely on your device.

We don’t use Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Hotjar, Mixpanel, or any other tracking or analytics service. We don’t use retargeting pixels. We don’t have social media tracking widgets embedded in our pages.

We don’t use fingerprinting (the irony of a site that explains browser fingerprinting actually doing it would be pretty rich). We don’t record your mouse movements, scroll behavior, or click patterns.

Fonts

Our fonts (Inter and JetBrains Mono) are self-hosted on our server. They’re loaded directly from our domain, not from Google Fonts or any other CDN. This means no requests are sent to Google or any other font service when you visit our site. Font providers have been caught logging visitor data, which is why we self-host.

CDN and DNS

Our site sits behind Cloudflare, which acts as a CDN (Content Delivery Network) and provides DDoS protection. When you visit whatismyip.wiki, your request passes through Cloudflare’s network before reaching our server.

Cloudflare has its own privacy policy regarding how they handle traffic passing through their network. We’ve configured Cloudflare with privacy-preserving settings (no Cloudflare analytics, no email obfuscation, no Rocket Loader). But we want to be transparent that Cloudflare processes your request as an intermediary.

Cloudflare’s privacy policy is available at cloudflare.com/privacypolicy. We recommend reading it if you’re concerned about intermediary data processing.

Our articles contain links to external sites, including whatismyip.technology (our tools site), whatismyip.codes (our API docs), and occasionally other reference material. When you click these links, you leave our site and are subject to those sites’ privacy policies. We don’t control what they collect.

Links to whatismyip.technology and whatismyip.codes are within our ecosystem, and we apply similar privacy principles across all three sites.

What We Don’t Collect

Just to be absolutely clear:

  • No email addresses (we don’t have a newsletter, contact form, or registration)
  • No personal information (name, phone number, location, demographics)
  • No browsing history beyond raw server logs
  • No search queries (search runs in your browser, not our server)
  • No device information beyond what’s in the User-Agent header
  • No financial information (we don’t sell anything)
  • No advertising identifiers
  • No cross-site tracking data

Data Storage and Security

What little data we have (server logs) lives on our Hetzner VPS in Germany. Hetzner’s data centers comply with European data protection standards. Our server uses:

  • SSH key-based authentication (no password access)
  • Regular security updates
  • Firewall rules limiting access to essential ports
  • HTTPS with modern TLS configuration
  • Security headers (HSTS, X-Content-Type-Options, X-Frame-Options, etc.)

We take server security seriously because we’d rather not be in the news for getting hacked. Not that there’s anything interesting to steal from us. The most valuable thing on our server is the articles we already publish for free.

Third Parties

We do not sell, rent, lease, lend, barter, or trade your data with anyone. We don’t have “data partners.” We don’t participate in data broker exchanges. We don’t share information with advertisers because we don’t have advertisers.

The only third parties that interact with your data are:

  1. Cloudflare for CDN and DDoS protection (as described above)
  2. Hetzner as our hosting provider (they operate the physical server hardware)

Neither of these parties receives data from us voluntarily. They’re infrastructure providers whose involvement is a technical necessity of operating a website.

Children’s Privacy

We don’t knowingly collect information from anyone, including children. Our site doesn’t have user accounts, and we don’t ask for any personal information. Our content is educational and appropriate for all ages; if a 12 year old wants to learn how DNS works, they’re welcome here.

International Users

Our server is in Germany. Our CDN (Cloudflare) has points of presence worldwide. If you’re accessing our site from outside Europe, your request travels through Cloudflare’s network and may be served from a location near you before ever reaching our origin server.

We comply with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in spirit and practice, though our compliance is fairly straightforward because we barely collect any data. If you’re an EU resident and want to exercise your rights under GDPR (access, rectification, erasure, portability), contact us. Given that we essentially have nothing but server logs with your IP address, the “erasure” request is mostly academic, but we’ll honor it.

Changes to This Policy

If we change this privacy policy, we’ll update the “Last updated” date at the top. We won’t start collecting data without telling you. We won’t add analytics and pretend it was always there. If we ever add features that involve data collection (like a newsletter or user accounts), we’ll update this policy first and make the changes obvious.

But honestly? We built this site specifically to be lightweight and privacy-respecting. Changing that would contradict our entire reason for existing.

Your Rights

Depending on where you live, you may have specific legal rights regarding your data:

GDPR (EU/EEA): Right to access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, data portability, and objection. Since we don’t collect personal data beyond server logs, most of these rights are moot. But we’ll respond to any valid request.

CCPA/CPRA (California): Right to know what data is collected, right to delete, right to opt out of sale. We don’t sell data, we barely collect data, and this policy tells you everything there is to know.

LGPD (Brazil), PIPA (South Korea), PDPA (Singapore/Thailand): Similar rights to GDPR. Same response: we don’t have much data, and what we have we don’t share.

If your jurisdiction has privacy laws we haven’t mentioned, the principle is the same: we collect minimal data, we don’t share it, and we’ll honor reasonable requests regarding it.

Contact

If you have questions about this privacy policy or want to exercise any privacy rights, reach out through the channels listed on whatismyip.technology. We’ll respond to privacy inquiries within a reasonable timeframe (usually a few days, but we’re a small team, so please be patient).

The Honest Summary

We built a static website that explains networking concepts. We don’t track you. We don’t profile you. We don’t sell your data because we don’t have meaningfully useful data to sell. Our server writes standard access logs that contain your IP address and what page you visited, and those logs exist primarily so we can tell if the site is broken.

That’s really all there is to it. If every website’s privacy policy were this boring, the internet would be a significantly better place.