What each step can see

The route is built so that no single point along it holds both halves of the interesting question: who you are and what you asked for. That is the design, and it is a real property rather than a marketing claim.

The comfortable summary people take from it is that nobody can see anything. That is not what the design says. It says the two halves are separated, which is a narrower and more useful statement, and the difference between the two versions is where most misplaced confidence comes from.

The 56 characters you typed are used to find a service, and the process is arranged so that the parts of the path that know where you are do not learn what you asked for. That is the point of the arrangement.

It does not follow that the address is invisible everywhere. It exists on your screen, in your browser, in whatever you copied it from, and in whatever you saved it to. Those are all outside the route, they are all under your control, and they are where the address is most exposed. The panel on where an address lives between visits is about that half of the problem.

• Your screen. Visible to anybody who can see it, which is a mundane risk that no network design addresses.
• Your machine. The address is in browsing state and in whatever you saved. What that means depends entirely on who else uses the machine.
• The place you got it from. If that was a message, a note or a photograph, the address is there too and probably will be for a long time.
• Your own habits. Using the same identifiers, the same names or the same phrasing across contexts is not something the route can help with.

There is a large and detailed literature on what is visible at each stage of a path like this, written by people who work on it. This is not that, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of confident half explanation that leads people to make bad decisions while feeling informed.

What a board like this can usefully do is name the boundary. Inside the route, the arrangement separates identity from request. Outside it, on your machine and in your habits, nothing is separated by anything and the ordinary rules apply.

The tiles count characters and compare front matches between the published addresses. Nothing about a path is measured here, because measuring one would mean making a connection, and this site never does.

The relevant point they do carry is that all three addresses share the same short opening. If you were ever concerned about the address appearing somewhere it should not, the shared opening is the part that identifies the set rather than the individual, and it is the part most likely to be recognised at a glance by somebody who was not looking carefully.

It is worth sitting with the shape of this for a moment, because it is the opposite of what people expect. The technically sophisticated half of the problem, the path, is handled by a design that a lot of careful people have worked on for a long time. The mundane half, the machine in front of you and the habits you bring, is handled by nobody at all.

Almost every practical failure sits in the mundane half. An address left in a shared browser, a screenshot that stayed in a photo library, a name reused from somewhere else, a note in a file that gets backed up automatically. None of those are network problems and none of them are improved by anything happening along the path.

That is the real reason this board keeps returning to storage, copying and naming rather than to the route. The route is the part that is already looked after. The rest is where a reader can actually change the outcome, and it is the part that gets the least attention because it is boring.

Does the route hide what I am doing from everybody?

It separates who you are from what you asked for along the path. That is a different and narrower statement than nobody can see anything.

Is my own machine covered by any of this?

No. The arrangement applies to the path. What is on your machine and in your habits is outside it entirely.