Imagine calling a locksmith to fix your door, then refusing to tell them your address because "what if they know where I live." 🤦
That's basically what happens in dev/support chats all the time:
Foobar123: nah I'm not giving that out, that's how people get hacked
And look, the instinct makes sense! "IP address" sounds like sensitive, secret, hacker-movie stuff. But here's the thing nobody tells you: every single website and server you've ever connected to already has it. Not "could get it if they tried" — has it, right now, sitting in a log file. That's not a security flaw, that's just how the internet works. Your device has to know where to send data, and the destination has to know where to send it back. No IP, no internet.
So when a dev asks for it, what they're actually asking is closer to:
dev: can you just say out loud the number your computer already showed me
Refusing doesn't protect anything — it just means they go check their own server logs instead of you saving everyone 30 seconds.
tl;dr: they already have it. Saying it out loud doesn't change that.
But isn't it like my home address? Not really. At most it tells someone your ISP and a rough city or region. It's less "here's my front door" and more "here's roughly which neighborhood I live in." Plenty of people in that neighborhood, no way to point at your house with it.
tl;dr: an IP gets you a city, not a street.
Can they hack me with it? Nope. An IP alone doesn't open any doors into your device, accounts, or files. About the worst-case realistic scenario is someone annoying you with traffic (DDoS), and most home routers already make that hard via NAT, plus your IP usually changes periodically anyway.
tl;dr: an IP isn't a key. It doesn't unlock anything.
So next time someone genuinely needs it to help you — fix lag, debug a connection, whatever — just send it. 🎉 They already had it the second you connected. You're not unlocking anything, you're just skipping a step.
tl;dr: stop guarding a number that was never secret in the first place.