Noting though that some people have a static IP address, some people have a relatively constant IP address and some people have an IP address that varies quite a lot (thinking only about your actual IP address, not any other IP address that you can get by using VPN or similar technology).
The latter option (varying IP address) may be the best option if you are worried about actual IP address disclosure. The first three octets of an IP address that changes every day might not disclose much.
(My IP address seems to have gone insane. Not only does it vary quite a lot but it even changes subnet unpredictably, and we are talking about some big subnets. And geoip is almost always wildly inaccurate. Who knows what my ISP is doing. So for me, it may be “millions of other schmucks”.)
The impact of knowing the IP address depends on your threat model. If my threat model includes my government then IP address + time implies identity, so IP address is best kept secret in that scenario.
But when it’s my bank emailing me “Did you just log in near Black Stump?” it’s actually unhelpful. I basically have to ignore all such emails (other than that, at least, I have never seen geoip produce something in the wrong country - so this security feature is only useful to the granularity of “country”, which is not completely useless in case some Russian hacker has hacked me).
So … two-edged sword. And a privacy–security trade-off.
You probably have a residential internet account which changes every time you or your neighborhood router has a reset. It almost like DHCP. Or perhaps it is?. I opted for a business account which lets me nail down my IP address.
In an unrelated matter (but interesting to me), I usually put the IP ranges in my hosts file with a wildcard in the last octet in the deny category. So it doesn’t matter to me who the 255 shmucks are. Actually mostly the last two octets. Rarely the last three. (Which usually blocks one or two whole countries or a big corp.)
Yeah, I’m too cheap to pay $X a month extra for a static IP address. However a static IP address would be available to me even on a residential plan. It would not require a business plan - for my specific ISP and for many ISPs here.
But then a static IP address in the context of this topic is a bad thing, not a good thing.
I have a 30 year old system in my garage. An IP that doesn’t change behind its back is a plus, otherwise it has to think about any change and do something about it.
My provider is T-Mobile, a business account is only 30 bucks more a month than a residential account. They also give you a different router (Inseego brand) that handles it.
Mine changes every time the MAC address connected to the ISP modem changes. (New router or fallback to old router or direct connect of laptop or whatever.)
Many years ago it would change whenever the ISP modem was power cycled. But a number of wide area power failures eventually put a stop to that.
Long ago, back when event large companies had address blocks large enough to not need NAT, even personal computers at work had fixed routeable IP addresses. Over time they switched to DHCP for office computers and eventually to NAT. Some time later they even put printers on DHCP with DHCP servers set to assign fixed IP addresses to individual printers. Chaos ensued when thousands of computers and printers came back up at the same time during recovery from a power failure.
It’s going to depend on the specific ISP and the specific internet connection technology but I think PPP is more common than DHCP here (I mean for the WAN side IPv4 address).
We anonymize the IP address of Vivaldi users by removing the last octet of the IP address …
is funny. It’s not much of an “anonymization”. The first three octets of an IPV4 address have a name: It’s called the “Network ID”.
Furthermore, forcing an IP change doesn’t help much either because, if you recall, Vivaldi also says:
When you install Vivaldi browser (“Vivaldi”), each installation profile is assigned a unique user ID that is stored on your device. Vivaldi will send a message using HTTPS directly to our servers located in Iceland every 24 hours containing this ID,
In other words, Vivaldi potentially saves the “unique user ID” along with a history of these possibly changing Network IDs.