What is my public IP address?

It appears at the top of this page as soon as it loads. Your device sends it with every request it makes: nothing to install, nothing to configure. From a terminal, curl monip.click returns the same address as plain text.

No. It points to your internet provider and a rough region, often no finer than a metropolitan area and sometimes wrong by hundreds of kilometres. Only your provider knows which subscriber held an address at a given time, and it discloses that only under a court order.

The public address belongs to your connection and is assigned by your provider: it is what websites see, and it is the one shown here. The private address identifies one device inside your home network and usually starts with 192.168 or 10. Every device in your home shares the same public address.

For most home subscribers, yes. It can change when the router restarts, after an outage, or at the provider's initiative. Some plans include a fixed address, usually for business use. This page remembers your previous addresses in your browser so it can tell you when one changes.

By routing your traffic through an intermediary: a VPN, a proxy or the Tor network. Websites then see that intermediary's address instead of yours. This moves trust rather than removing it, since the service provider sees all of your traffic in turn.

Because a server only sees the protocol you arrived on. If your connection used IPv4, your IPv6 address stays invisible from this page even when your provider assigns you one. Many providers still do not enable it by default.