Man even in the 90's nobody was scared of having their IP address known because there's not a helluva lot you can do with one anyway, and the average regular person is using a dynamic one that resolves to a local CO and not usually their actual home address.

It was quite normal to scare the normies by having a forum signature that displayed the IP address of the machine loading the page because something that basic was enough to make them think you were a hacking wizard.

Those who were especially paranoid, used proxies (maybe VPNs but I never even heard that term until NordVPN started advertising all over the place).