What this actually means
None of the above required you to log in, accept anything, or click a single button. Your browser volunteered it the moment the page loaded — that’s simply how the web works. The question isn’t whether sites can see it, it’s how much of it you’re happy to hand over.
The timezone giveaway
This is the one most people have never heard of, and it’s the most common way a VPN quietly betrays you. Your IP says one country; your browser reports the timezone your computer is actually set to. If those two disagree, a site can spot the gap instantly and infer that you’re on a VPN — or take a decent guess at where you really are.
Streaming services use exactly this trick. It’s also why a VPN alone sometimes isn’t enough to convince a site you’re local: your machine is still shouting Europe/Dublin while your IP claims Amsterdam. Changing your system timezone to match the server you’ve connected to closes the gap.
WebRTC, honestly
WebRTC used to be the classic VPN leak: the browser would hand out your real IP address even with a VPN running. We’ll be straight with you — modern browsers have largely fixed this. Most now return an obfuscated local address instead of your real one, and the scary “WebRTC leak” warnings you see on other sites are frequently out of date.
We still test it, because a badly configured VPN or an older browser can still leak. If the tool above found a public IP that differs from your connection’s, that’s a genuine problem worth fixing — our VPN leak test guide walks through it.
What a VPN fixes — and what it doesn’t
Here’s the honest split, and it matters:
- A VPN does fix your IP and location. That’s the big one — it’s what sites use to geo-block you, and what your provider (and anyone watching the network) sees. Change that and you change the most identifying thing about your connection. Our guide on how to hide your IP address covers the options.
- A VPN does not fix your fingerprint. Your canvas/WebGL signature, fonts, screen size, cores and device traits stay exactly the same behind a VPN. That combination can follow your browser across sites regardless. For that you need anti-fingerprinting — Tor Browser, or the protections in Firefox and Brave — not a VPN.
- A VPN does not make you anonymous. If you sign in to an account, you’ve identified yourself no matter what your IP says.
We’d rather you knew that than bought a VPN expecting it to do something it can’t. Where a VPN genuinely earns its money is privacy from your ISP and network, and reaching services that geo-block you.
VPNs we rate for privacy
If the report above made you want your IP and location out of the picture, these are the providers that score highest on privacy in our testing — audited no-logs policies, strong jurisdictions and real leak protection:
See the full table in our best VPN for privacy ranking, or our overall best VPN for Ireland picks.
We don’t store any of this
Worth stating plainly, because a page like this only works on trust. Your IP is read from your own request at the edge and sent straight back to your browser — it is never written to a log or a database. Everything else on this page (timezone, fingerprint, WebRTC, device details) is computed in your browser and never leaves it. We hold no record of who checked, or what it said.