This actually happened to me. I'm using a persistent VPN (50% to access my private infrastructure and 50% because I have a hostile ISP).
I mostly don't use any Google services (maybe one google search a month and the occasional google map search but I avoid when I can) and I was very surprised when once I did a google search and saw my postal code at the end of the page. The IP address was for a VPS (in the same city but with a different post code). I found it unusual but didn't pay too much attention. A few months later I moved places (different post code) and after a while google had my new post code at the end of their search page. That's when I found it troubling and assumed that a family member's iPhone was using Google Maps and based on the 'directions' usage they figured out that that IP address has a home address for those GPS coordinates. (The iPhone in question is reasonably 'hardened' with background updates off and location services only 'when app opened' and disabled for most system services). That was the only plausible correlation between IP address and location google could have done automatically - neither I nor the said family member no longer login to old google accounts we had many years back.
That's when I started rotating IP daily (which is trivial in my case as I use lightsail, I issue a shutdown from a different server and then a power on, AWS rotates the IP automatically out of a very large pool - so far I haven't gotten the same IP twice).
The only problem I have with lightsail is that I often get a 'dirty' IP so I rotate 4-5 times before getting a good one (I test this by going a curl on a website that sends google captcha on dirty IPs but lets the 'good' ones straight in).
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> Your IP address is a largely irrelevant metric in modern tracking systems.
I don't believe this for one second.
Your IP address on its own is not sufficient to identify you. That doesn't mean your IP address is not helpful in identifying you.
If you have Javascript disabled, it is a heck of a lot easier to identify you with a combination of an IP address, user agent, and OS than it is to identify you without the IP address cutting down the pool of potential visitors.
On top of that, if you're targeting me and do a geo-location of my IP address, it will get you within 5 miles of my house. That's close enough that you'll know which county I'm in, which with a few other easily-obtained pieces of information will let you pull up my voter registration, which will give you my exact street address.
Of course, you could mitigate this by setting up your own VPN on something like Linode, but unless you're regularly rotating IP addresses, you've just traded a pseudo-identifier that multiple people/devices share for a persistent identifier.
This argument comes up all the time, and I have never heard anyone explain it in a way that passes my sniff test. If you want me to stop using a VPN, you need to do a lot better than just claiming that IP addresses don't matter -- you need to show some kind of evidence to back that up.
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Broadcasting your IP address to every website you've ever visited is a completely valid concern that gets hand-waved out the wazoo whenever this subject comes up.
I've sent bug reports to sites that publicly tied IP addresses to comments/accounts so anyone could track your movement patterns over time. Yes, that info can be useful to an attacker trying to deanonomyze you. Yes, that info can be used to link users together. Yes, that info can be used to narrow the pool of potential visitors so other fingerprinting techniques are more powerful.
It is blanketly ridiculous to claim that an approximate county-level geolocation isn't a useful data-point to attackers. If IP addresses weren't useful, the Tor project wouldn't be going to such lengths to hide them.