No, I’m not about to do so nor has it been done to me. I only say so because I know “is so-and-so illegal” questions always raise eyebrows.
If, as a for-instance, you moderated a web forum and decided to make the IP address of one of your users public (say, by posting it) would there be any criminal recourse under the law? I know that you can technically sue anyone for anything – or attempt to, anyway but is there an actual statute that prohibits revealing such information? Would the age of the user whose IP was revealed make any difference?
I’ve tried numerous searches for the answer online and nothing comes up.
I have never heard of something like that being illegal and I don’t really know why it would be. An IP address usually can’t be definitely tied back even to a specific computer let alone a person. Many personal ISP Ip addresses are dynamic and get reassigned to different people all the time. The best you can usually do is tie the IP address to a geographic area. That might be enough to allow people to make guesses about the user in many cases but it doesn’t prove anything. I would think that freedom of speech would trump privacy especially since it is such indirect information.
Anyone who thinks his IP address is ever private is completely deluded about how the Internet works and, in a perfect world, would get laughed out of court if he ever tried to testify as to matters involving computer networks. Your computer’s IP address is one piece of information that must be known to outside computers and you, in general, have no control over what those computers will do with it.
The plus side is, as Shagnasty said, an IP address isn’t all that personal in any event. Generally, the furthest it can be traced back is to a pool of addresses assigned to a specific ISP. You need a subpoena to get the ISP’s records as to which address was assigned to which customer at which times. Some people run things like websites out of their homes and you can trace back the IP addresses of the computers hosting their websites back to their homes, but that still doesn’t give you anything like a street address. The best you can do on an IP address alone is the town.
(It is possible to (sometimes) get a street address via the WHOIS database, but WHOIS records are frequently falsified even though that is, in fact, illegal. In any event, the WHOIS database isn’t tied to IP addresses.)
I post to a board that has IPs posted. You know before you post.
Same here. I moderate a board that has IPs fully visible to everyone. In the EZboards system, that’s an option that the board owner can turn on or off when they desire.
You reveal your IP address to everyone that you send an email to, assuming you don’t use a web-based system.
Not really, or at least not always. You usually reveal the IP address of the machine that sent the email, but (in the case of the average schlub on dial-up) that will be a machine the ISP owns with a stable IP address and not your home computer.
Of course, forged headers and other tricks spammers use make all of this more complicated in the general case.
And, of course, if you post from a machine with a static, it IS kinda’ permanent.