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Think your VPN hides your IP? Think again.

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Think your VPN hides your IP?

You may be exposed and not realize it

Are you using the Google Chrome browser on a Windows PC when using your VPN service?  If so you may be exposing your real IP to the websites you visit.
WebRTC is a standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium that supports real-time communications inside your browser.  For example if you video chat or do audio calls in your browser and you don’t have Adobe Flash installed then you’re probably using WebRTC.
Unfortunately javascript placed on a web page you visit can use WebRTC to get your real IP address.  This WebRTC exposure javascript is now so widely used now that even the New York Times uses it to gather local IP addresses.
You can check to see if your browser is leaking your IP by visiting the Browserleaks.com WebRTC page.  To stop WebRTC from leaking your IP with Chrome the only fix seems to be with a Chrome extension called Scriptsafe that unfortunately doesn’t seem to be rated very well.
With Firefox you can type in about:config in the address bar, then go to media.peerconnection.enabled and set it to false.  Don’t use a VPN?  Then it still may be a good idea to disable WebRTC if you have no plans to use it.

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