If you know someone's IP address what can you find out about them? Nothing to do with me or this website (promise! ) but there is a person threatening to "track down" another person using their IP. (yes, it's as silly as it sounds LOL)


I was under the impression that you could find the area that a person is in and just did a search myself on my own numbers and ones that have been attributed to me over the past few days and all I can come up with is that I am in Sydney or Melbourne. It's only a 1000kms out ...

Your IP address will track you as far as your providers server. In your case copago, wherever you are actually located in Oz, you are evidently connected through a server in Sydney.
Your IP address will also list the name of your provider. Generally (but not always) the first two octets of an IP address identify the country and area.
In order to totally block a person from a website, these are the two octets that are blocked. The problem is though, that all other users having the same first two octets will ALSO be blocked.
Blocking, or tracing a person, is made difficult nowadays though, because most IP providers, use dynamic IP's. Everytime you connect, or reboot your router in the case of an "always on" connection, the provider allocates your IP from a "block" of IP addresses.

Given an IP address, you can find the users ISP (as stated). A telephone call to someone working in the ISP's call centre, posing as for example a policeman/government official/IT installer/someone important etc, at the wrong moment to someone who has just been dumped by his girlfriend/has been given one weeks notice/simply has not been adequately trained to not give out customers details and some personal information could be leaked. Not too likely, but there are cases where it has happened.

Also, some messageboards/forums and other such sites sometimes show the users IP address. If its not dynamically allocated, then it is possible to piece together bits of information left on various boards, as someone demonstrated.

A friend was able to find the home address of someone who was sending unpleasant emails to his wife by googling his IP address. His IP address was against an objection he had made to a planning application that had been submitted to the council. This gave him the street. His IP address was also found on a motoring forum where he was asking for advice about trouble he had with his car. He visited the street and found a matching car. At this point he handed the information to the police who cautioned the chap who was sending obscene material.

Also, another way people can be traced is that they tend to use the same username on all sorts of forums and social networking sites - a snippet of information here, a silly photo there, a list of some friends (who may not think twice about giving out some info) and it could be possible to trace someone that way.

Hello Dave1968 and welcome

Have ISP employees be tricked over the phone into looking up records and giving information about who was assigned a particular IP address at a given time? I haven't heard of cases where Court Orders issued by an appropriate authority have been bypassed.

I must have looked into many forums over the years while searching for bits of information. I'm a member of some. None reveal IP addresses to members or passers by. It is true that a forum's Admin has access to the IP addresses but then so do the server logs of all the sites we visit.

An IP address is no secret and we have to accept that or not use the Internet. What can be discovered from this alone anyway? Only an approximate whereabouts in the world, browser type and operating system. Having used the Internet for around eleven years now, I can only say this hasn't proved harmful to me so far.

As said, more idea of where we live can be gained one way or another from what we say about ourselves. Whether that matters is up to the individual to decide. You have to ask yourself what the likelihood is of anyone bothering to find your street address anyway? I believe cases of unwelcome visitors from the Internet are pretty rare. I've only heard of one and I don't think the IP address played a part in the tracking.

E-mails are different since they are sent/received from one individual to another. IP information can be discovered in the e-mail headers. Therefore it may be possible to track an email's path across the Internet and tie its origin to an area. In the case mentioned, this had to be tied to other factors in order to find a street address.

Some use the Internet via a proxy server to hide their true IP address. Maybe there are those who have something to hide but I think proxy servers are mostly used because of the worrying talk about IP addresses and the 'Big Brother' situation. The average Internet user need not worry about this in my opinion.

Perhaps the Internet isn't a totally private place but information given via our Internet Browsers doesn't seem much when compared to the amount of information stored on various databases as part of everyday life (medical - dental - tax - government - local government etc etc). There are organisations/businesses that know a quite a bit about us ..all information being tied to names and addresses. We accept this and don't worry about it. So why worry about the limited information that might be gained from our Internet habits?

Edit: Typo