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Privacy, Addressing, and Network Visibility

Several misconceptions exist regarding network privacy and device addressing:

  • HTTPS Privacy: While HTTPS encrypts page contents, it does not conceal all online activity. DNS lookups, which translate human-friendly domain names like example.com into numeric IP addresses, can still reveal the specific sites being visited.
  • IP Address Geolocation: While IP addresses are used to route data across networks and MAC addresses identify devices on a local segment, an IP address does not pinpoint an individual's exact physical location. Instead, it generally identifies a network or region, and multiple devices often share a single public IP address through Network Address Translation (NAT).

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Updated 2026-09-04

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