☷ip-tools.eu

Privacy policy

ip-tools.eu shows you what your connection reveals about you. To do that it collects and analyses data about your connection; that is the purpose of the site. This policy describes which data that is, how long it is kept and who besides us sees it. There are no cookies, no tracking, no analytics and no ads.

1. Controller

Email:

No data protection officer is appointed or required.

2. Server log files

For every request to ip-tools.eu, the web server (Apache) logs the IP address, date and time, the full requested address (for the IP lookup that includes the address looked up), the HTTP status code, the amount of data sent, the referring page and the browser's user agent. The purpose is secure operation and finding errors; the legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR. Logs are deleted automatically after 14 days, unless an incident has to be investigated, in which case they are kept until it is resolved.

3. Analysis of your connection

The analysis runs on this site's own measurement hosts (netcap.ip-tools.eu, netcap4, netcap6 and the names under nnscap.ip-tools.eu), which your browser contacts when the page loads. It collects:

  • the network packets of your connections to these hosts (up to 200 per IP address: IP, TCP and UDP headers, the TLS handshake, DNS and STUN queries, encrypted payload),
  • the start of your decrypted HTTP request to the measurement host (headers, user agent, Client Hints),
  • the operating system's measurements of the connection (round-trip time, packet size, congestion window) and fingerprints derived from them (such as JA3, JA4, p0f),
  • your DNS resolver's queries to the site's own name server (resolver address, possibly part of your network via EDNS Client Subnet), matched by a random token, not by your IP address,
  • your public address and port as a STUN server sees them,
  • sent by your browser: your time zone, language settings, IP addresses visible through WebRTC, the negotiated protocol and the connection time.

From this the site computes an assessment (for example whether a VPN or proxy is likely), shown only to you. Nothing is decided about you on ip-tools.eu.

All of this is held in memory only and never written to disk. It is discarded automatically after seconds to minutes: packets 20 seconds after the last traffic, connection data after 30 seconds, STUN mappings after 2 minutes, resolver observations after at most 10 minutes. Only the mapping of an IP address to its network operator (ASN) stays cached for up to 24 hours, and the IP address stays in a rate-limit list for repeated measurements until the service restarts.

The legal basis is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR; the legitimate interest is delivering the analysis you opened. Reading information from your browser is strictly necessary for this service you asked for (§ 25(2) no. 2 TDDDG).

4. Active measurements

When you open the "Path & NAT" tab (or "all"), the server sends ICMP packets to your IP address to measure the path MTU and how IPv6 extension headers are handled. A traceroute to your address and the speed test only run when you start them with a button. The results are also kept in memory only; the last 128 traceroutes are overwritten in turn.

5. Third parties that see your IP address

  • Google STUN server (stun.l.google.com, Google LLC, USA): when the dashboard loads, your browser asks this server via WebRTC, to find out whether WebRTC exposes a different IP address than your connection. Google receives your IP address. Google is certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (Art. 45 GDPR).
  • Reverse DNS: the host name of your IP address (and of any address you enter in the IP lookup) is queried via DNS. The query reaches the operator of that reverse zone, usually your internet provider.
  • Team Cymru (USA): if the local database does not know an address's network operator (mostly for IPv6), the address is sent via DNS to Team Cymru's IP-to-ASN service.

The legal basis in each case is Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR (a complete analysis of the connection). Location data comes from an offline database on the site's own server; no address is sent anywhere for it. Fonts and all other files come from the site's own server.

6. Public API

Any IP address can be looked up through /api/geo. Lookups appear in the server logs (section 2); for rate limiting, the caller's IP address is held in memory for about a minute.

7. Use by other websites

Other websites of the controller can use the connection analysis to prevent abuse. Your browser then hands the result, encrypted, to that website; ip-tools.eu keeps nothing of it. Details are in that website's privacy policy.

8. Storage in your browser

ip-tools.eu sets no cookies and uses neither localStorage nor IndexedDB. Only technical entries remain in your browser's cache (HSTS, Alt-Svc for HTTP/3, Client Hints preferences). The device fingerprint on the "Browser" tab is computed and shown in your browser only, never sent.

9. Hosting

The site runs on a server operated by the controller. All connections to the site are encrypted with TLS.

10. Your rights

You have the right of access (Art. 15 GDPR), rectification (Art. 16), erasure (Art. 17), restriction of processing (Art. 18), data portability (Art. 20) and to object to processing based on Art. 6(1)(f) (Art. 21). An email to the address above is enough. Since most data is discarded within minutes, usually only server log entries about you still exist. You can also lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority (Art. 77 GDPR), in particular in the member state where you live.

Last updated: October 2026