IP Logging and Tracing Question

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Here on WP, I have questions i would like to ask, but i am afraid to. I know that most sites log IP addies, but does my ISP know or even care what i do (assuming its legal)?

The following is an example only: say i was looking for suicide info, could my ISP lock on to that, contact authorities and dispatch "help" to my home?

Is posting on WP safe? Does my ISP know that i have aspergers? or is there simply too much web traffic for them to be interested in me?

Is WP able to take my IP adr. and get my home address from that?

I don't think anybody is monitoring the millions and millions of Internet users as closely as that, despite what you see in the movies. Even the labyrinthine Big Brother security agencies have to narrow it down to specific types of activity, 'cause they just don't have the resources to watch everybody. Of course, there are rumors of a CIA supercomputer that can...

I can tell you, however, that I had a Canon printer in the 90s that came with an ap on the setup Cd which would allow you to click on the info of a person you were chatting with online, and it would within ten seconds trace all the way back to the city and street address of their ISP. That's pretty specific, so I have to assume with the right software, someone can get pretty close to where you are. But there would have to be a reason for them to bother.

I mean, if they just wanted to murder you and throw you in a river, it would be just as easy to befriend you online and talk you into meeting them somewhere.

Why so...serious?

If you really don't want to be tracked, don't use Facebook, Twitter or iPhones.

MOst information used to track and get you put into a hospital is that you provide. If you use the same nickname on different sites and provide information that may link the profiles. For example, on On plentyoffish.com, you post a video, and someone looks at the video and check out the userid of the poster, he or she will see other videos that were done by the poster. This may lead to other websites frequented. However, there are programs such as Tor and privoxy that can mask your IP address.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRA_law
yummy...

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I run/own an ISP - so I can tell you how this really works.

When you apply for IP addresses (in the US this is via ARIN) you have to give them your full location info (for the ISP). This is public information that is linked to the IP address block and can be looked up freely by anyone (check out the WHOIS feature on the ARIN.net web site).

Some larger ISPs may provide different address info for different blocks, but in many cases, the ISP provides the same address info every time they apply for IP blocks. If the IP is only located in 1 city, you can identify the user's city. If the ISP is nationwide (baby bell, cell company, etc), you can't really figure out anything. We provide service across 2 states - yet if you look up a user IP it always shows our home office because that's what we provide ARIN.

As far as sniffing individual traffic, we don't have time or the hard-drive space to do this. If we receive complaints about email, we'll go through extensive logs that may contain private/confidential information (depending on the sender), but in general, we don't look at web traffic.

We have been subpoenaed by the FBI to provide additional information when illegal activity has been detected from our network. They provide sniffing hardware and ask you to provide a mechanism to view the traffic to/from a set of addresses. In our case they just used a server and we replicated traffic to them. So we had some amount of control (we didn't send them all the data on our network) and supposedly they filtered it even further than that. The agents that I've worked with seem to care about not intruding into other areas - they contacted us when legal traffic passed their filter to make sure we agreed it was legit.

Obviously, as a wireline ISP, we do know the physical location of each customer. Our privacy policy states that we won't give this out (or the identity of the customer) unless provided the proper legal paperwork. In the US, the FBI no longer needs court approval (thanks to the Patriot Act) but most local law enforcement agencies will get subpoenas from a judge if you tell them that you have the information they're looking for.

And there we go, this thread is now officially:

Every single site you go on logs your IP. How long it's logged depends on the site. ISPs log their customers' history for a year. None of this really matters though, it's not monitored closely as Willard said.

Well, I could put an image in this page that's hosted on my web server, and then everyone who visits the page and views that image leaves their IP address in my web server's logs (or at least the IP address of a TOR exit point or proxy service, which is not much use in tracking anyone).

So if they aren't using an anonymising service, I've got something to go on. If like me they're running a web server from their own home, and have a domain name registered for it, then all I need to do is do a reverse whois to find out if there is a domain name linked to the IP adresses I've got, and unless the domain was registered anonymously, I've got someone's home address.

(For the record, the address on my domain is wrong, as it hasn't been updated since I moved house).