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Can You Really Be Traced From an IP Address?
Barence writes "Identifying individuals using nothing more than their IP address has become a key part of anti-piracy and criminal investigations. But a PC Pro investigation casts serious doubt on the validity of IP-based evidence. 'In general, the accuracy of IP address tracing varies depending on the type of user behind the IP address,' Tom Colvin, chief technology officer with security vendor Conseal told PC Pro. 'Whilst big businesses can be traceable right back to their datacenters, standard family broadband connections are often hard to locate, even to county-level accuracy.'"
Depending on what data is being captured by the ISP for management purposes, this COULD be true.
But, if they can track you well enough to meter you (Comcast, AT&T, etc), they can track you down to your IP too.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This is not the problem with IP tracking. In most instances the ISP will have logs linking IPs to customers, and people can be easily traced. The real problem is that AN IP IS NOT A PERSON. You cannot trace a person through an ISP (except through strong circumstantial evidence such as someone using their email account from that IP). If all the info you have is that someone/something at IP 12.34.56.78 downloaded kiddie porn, that's no evidence at all. Was it the suspect? Was it a family member or friend? Was it some random on the street who cracked the WEP key or accessed an open network? You have no idea and you never will unless you can find 1) evidence on a computer and 2) evidence that the suspect was using said computer at the time.
I'm often having to remind users in the office that a simple reverse lookup on our IP and there's the company name sat right there, a few clicks and you've got the building address. Go onto linked in and you've probably got half the employees full names. A lot of people forget just how much information you can get from work IP's. It's not CSI style VB GUI interface level but if you're about to go make some stupid edits on wikipedia don't do it from your office connection.
jaymz
I would say if your address is static OR you ISP is happy to cooperate; only takes one for you to be quite trackable. What worries me a bit is that this article seems to advocate for legal precedent to be based on this idea, which is quite short sighted. Yea, right now it might be a bit hard to authoritatively determine the end user of a dynamic IP, but IPv6 is coming and when it does, everything and everyone will have their own, easily traceable IP address. Privacy laws need to be based around that assumption now.