I'm curious what additional programs are being run in that the OP feels she can get someones street address from an IP pull from her website. At BEST, the programs used by websites can give a city and a state.. and depending on the internet provider, even those can be off. My personal IP gives me as being in a city 20 miles away from where I actually am.
The ability to actually pull an address is above and beyond the scope of the typical "where in the world" clicker that most webhosts offer.
You know what.. I'll throw a free challenge in. If you look at your logs from yesterday, you should see someone hitting your site from Ohio-- that's me. PM me and tell me where I am. No tricks... I'm moving shortly so I don't care if some random person traces me at this point.
Originally Posted by Grace Preston
As a result of the
homeland security act, every webstie will record your IP address. There is no other way of concealing that peice of information besides downloading and using a VPN religiously. And even then, that's not 100% in concealing your identity. If you don't want to be discovered, then don't use technology period.
Nonetheless, when a gentleman fills out the contact form on my website (or sends me an email) , his IP address is included. I can research his IP address using a geolocator to see the location of the server that he sent it from. Now, will the location of the server lead to the gentleman's physical ddress? No. But on the other hand, when I lived in Dallas I did do an IP address aon a suspicious email and it took me Dallas Police HQ. Obviously, the email was sent from one of their own servers.
In essense: When you geolocate an IP address, you will only get the location of the ISP.
But, why would anyone keep note of an IP address? It's simple.
I've been able to link different harassing email accounts because that had the same IP address. Which, if you've ever wondered how the mods on this site are able to discover multple accounts, it's because they can check the IP address. If they see that two accounts have the same IP address, then its assumed that one person is behind the account.
Lastly, I did file a police report on the individual who was harassing me as some of those emails included death threats and such. When I filed the police reports, I included the IP Address so that LE could further ivestigate. Rest assured, LE can contact an ISP and the ISP will release information about a particular user.
There is no such thing as anonymity on the internet folks.