Is this possible?

[Stg-Flame]

Is it possible for someone to find my physical address solely from my IP address?

 

[twizzlebizzle22]

Very possible. Unlikely yes. The IP and host will generally point to some course location. (Mine points to about 5 miles away).

Your ISP will keep on record your current assigned IP and your address.

 

[Stg-Flame]

I was always under the assumption the IP address pointed to the local ISP hub and not the physical address itself.

 

[John Connor]

Very possible. Unlikely yes. The IP and host will generally point to some course location. (Mine points to about 5 miles away).

You're five miles away from Amazon AWS?

 

[John Connor]

I was always under the assumption the IP address pointed to the local ISP hub and not the physical address itself.

If someone has your IP and wanted to know your home address they would have to subpoena your ISP. This is law enforcement.

If a hacker has your IP they could potentially hack into your computer and grab some details about you indicating where you live.

Of course depending on what you do in the great Internets and Social Networking your address may already be known.

 

[Stg-Flame]

Thanks for the information. Considering I don't do social networking, the only way someone would have my information would probably be from Steam.

This topic was brought on by a friend as we were having a discussion about what people can see about you regarding personal details strictly from playing online with someone. I concluded consoles inherently give out more personal information and that got us on the topic of what type of information can a person obtain with just your IP.

 

[John Connor]

Thanks for the information. Considering I don't do social networking, the only way someone would have my information would probably be from Steam.

This topic was brought on by a friend as we were having a discussion about what people can see about you regarding personal details strictly from playing online with someone. I concluded consoles inherently give out more personal information and that got us on the topic of what type of information can a person obtain with just your IP.

If you vote chances are your name, address, phone number and political affiliation are on the net. Mine are because of a dick that made this website to share registered voters. And here I went to no less than 16 websites and had my info. removed! Now I need a mail box at a mail box store, and maybe a Google number just so I'm not on the damn Internet. I have plans for this guy. HEHEHE :twisted:

 

[Elixer]

If you vote chances are your name, address, phone number and political affiliation are on the net. Mine are because of a dick that made this website to share registered voters. And here I went to no less than 16 websites and had my info. removed! Now I need a mail box at a mail box store, and maybe a Google number just so I'm not on the damn Internet. I have plans for this guy. HEHEHE :twisted:

It isn't only if you vote.. if you have applied for a job the government, or those resume sites, or paid property taxes...or...or. Nobody is encrypting anything these days, so, it is all out there.

Heck, if you have a phone with geo location on, they can very well know your EXACT address as well. Install a program on the phone, and it can phone home with tons of info about you as well, and most of the time, that info is NOT encrypted either.

So many exploits in phones and everything else, it isn't funny.

 

[John Connor]

That's why I said I have been to at least 16 sites and removed all that crap.

Silentcircle.com sells a blackphone. I wonder how good those are? And you can turn off location.

Also, I would make sure metadata is stripped form images before posting to the Internet.

This will get you started: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/j1mit/how_to_remove_yourself_from_all_background_check

More info: https://news.yahoo.com/how-to-delete-yourself-from-the-internet.html

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Is it possible for someone to find my physical address solely from my IP address?

There's no definitive mapping of external (WAN) IP address to your physical address, outside of your ISP's customer database, someone could in theory hack that, but a lot of ISPs run very tight security so the odds of this are incredibly slim.

There have been other hacks over the years which attempt geolocation, Samy Kamkar did one where he used the google API to query location. When googles street cars drive around to photo the streets they also collect Wifi data including everyones routers WAN MAC address, they then use this in their location services where a phone or other device might report back what wifi hotspots it can see and then google can do a lookup to find your approx location.

There was some hacks which have largely been fixed now which allowed remote attackers to log into your router and determine the WAN MAC across the internet which then in turn can be used to locate you via the method above.

There's no contemporary equivalents of that which I'm aware of, there's a few other lookup services which will trace route connections back to an IP address and they'll make broad inferences about the city or nearest routing hub to you and state that as your location, that's rough but often useful.

 

[Bart*Simpson]

Is it possible for someone to find my physical address solely from my IP address?

It's possible.

The reason an IP address comes in four octets is because IPv4 had to initially exist on telephone switching networks.

So an IP address of 255.255.255.254 corresponds to a phone number.

Phone numbers have the structure of (Country code) (Area Code) (Prefix) (Phone Number).

In theory then a current-day IPv4 address can be tied to your physical address just like your phone number can be tied to your physical address.

"Can be" does not mean this universally applies.

 

[Charmonium]

This is one of the reasons that you should always use a vpn. It's unlikely that anyone will be able to get your exact address just from your IP since your IP will cycle periodically. I've never checked with my cable modem but I think it's every couple months or so unless you reset the modem yourself. But then you have to leave it off long enough that the ip gets assigned to someone else. That could take a half an hour or longer depending on time of day and traffic.

The problem is that even when it get refreshed, it's probably still going to poin to the same general area.

The real danger is when you go online to order something. Vendors don't really have that much of an interest in keeping your data private. So every time you place an order with your real name and address, that gets entered into the vendor's database and there's nothing to stop them from sharing that info with marketers.

That's why in addition to a vpn, I have my credit card set up with 4 other 'designated users.' Almost all of these are aliases but you really only need one alias to effectively mask your online presence. Any data sharing will then have that alias associated with your street address.

The real issue comes from other bills associated with your street address like water, power, garbage collection, etc. It can be very difficult to use an alias for these since they generally want some form of id to create the account. And if you own your own home, most property records are online and easily searchable. The only way around that is to put your property into a trust and have the name of the trust appear in the public record. It's not that hard to do but more than likely you would want a lawyer to set this up for you.

 

[Stg-Flame]

Thanks for all the additional information. My buddy always gives me grief since I'm a little overly cautious when it comes to security and what I allow on my phone. I've followed mechbgone's advice for years for Internet security and I've never had a problem. My buddy, on the other hand, has dealt with identify theft and two stolen credit cards because he is careless with his online activity (he even saved his cc information on a public library computer after buying a game on amazon).