And how granular can they get?
I posted on a board and they honed right in on the town I live in. Its no big deal except I would like to know how close they can get to my actual street address.
Thanks.
IP addresses are assigned to organizations (businesses, ISPs, universities, government agencies, etc.) by IANA, and the databases containing the assigned ranges are publicly available. By correlating your IP with the business it is assigned to, plus some other information (like intelligence about your ISP’s network architecture) you can make an educated guess about your location. There are a number of freely-available databases out there that map IP ranges to best-guess location information. They’re not always up-to-date, and sometimes they are hilariously wrong. But they are getting better as more information is collected.
Generally the best they can get is at a neighborhood level, which is pretty close, but unless you’ve paid for a static IP it’s usually impossible to narrow it down to individual’s address.
Though as friedo said, sometimes they’re way off. Last I checked they thought I was somewhere in Alabama (I’m in Tucson, AZ).
To add just a little to the above, your IP will can usually be tracked to your internet provider, and to more specific locations for that provider. But there is no requirement to map IPs to a specific geographical location. Your IP might seem to be from someplace else entirely. There are a number of ways to use a different IP than the one assigned by your internet provider if you want to disguise your location. But unless you are on the lam, planning nepharious activity, or really paranoid, there isn’t much need to do that.
Thanks, both.
The board I referred to prints something like this (q5NFp) instead of your actual numerical IP address for every poster.
Why?
My guess would be they are printing a one-way hash of the IP so that users can tell if two posts were made from the same address, but they don’t know what the actual address is, so they can’t do silly things like launch DDoS attacks against people they don’t like.
Here’s a very easy way to look up info on an IP address: http://whois.domaintools.com/
I’ve found this site to be quite good at showing what other people can find out about you. It’s based on background information that your computer sends out.
The nearest that these IP address locators get to me is about 200 miles away, in the neighboring state. The ads that try to customize to my address are way wrong.
The ‘local’ mom with the amazing skin treatment in my home town is not anywhere near me. Must be some hub of my ISP.
It doesn’t always work. For a long time, my IP adress indicated that I was residing in some unheard of village in the region around Paris. At another time, briefly, it located me in Spain.
The closest my IP address can get to my location is a neighbouring suburb.