Can I get someone's name and address from their IP address?

Can I get someone's name and address from their IP address? This is a great question. There are a lot of myths and rumors that swirl around the Internet about IP addresses. I read a question on one message board on which a very, very concerned parent asked about IP addresses and stalkers. Apparently, this poor woman's kid had posted something rather mean and unflattering on someone else's blog or something like that. The owner of the website then replied to the kid. He told this kid that he had his IP address, and so he now knew his exact home address, his phone number, his name, his social security number, had access to credit cards and bank accounts, knew his work address, and basically every single confidential and private piece of information that you could know about a person and, of course, that he was going to come and get this poor kid.

You can see why the mother was concerned.

Well, to rest your uneasy minds (or maybe to disappoint you a little bit), you can't get that much information just from someone's IP address. But you can get a fair amount.
First of all, let's define an IP address. Basically, an IP address is a number-a totally unique number-that is assigned to each machine on the Internet. An example of what an IP address looks like is 892.6.3.237 An IP address functions essentially like your phone number does. Your computer has an IP address when the computer is online. Websites have IP addresses. Computers communicate through IP addresses. The way that your computer finds the website that you type in to your search engine or whatever is by looking up its IP address, and then finding the exact location of the IP address in cyberspace. I don't want to get too complicated here, so I'll keep things really simple. IP addresses can be recorded by websites. People who run blogs or websites where you can communicate can keep track and record the IP addresses of the computers that visit their websites. Actually, a website can record the IP address of every computer that visits the site. This means that essentially you're all being kept track of.

However, there is something that you should know. The majority of the time, the IP address that is being used is not actually the address of your computer. Instead, the IP address that's used when you go online on your computer is the IP address of the server that you're connecting to. So rather than your physical location being recorded, the physical location of your server is being recorded.

There are a number of websites that you can visit to find the geographical location of an IP address. For example, you could go to http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm?GetLocation. Another great website that keeps track of IP addresses and will help you find the geographical location of the IP address is www.arin.com. Another one that you can go to, and that Arin will link you to if you want it, is www.domaintools.com. Two more great IP address geographical location websites are www.ip2location.com. Or try the website www.dnsstuff.com. Now you should know that you can find the city and state and country of a specific IP address through one of these sites. The other thing that you should know is that you can't pin down the exact physical address-the street location, etc.-with just an IP address and one of these sites. It doesn't work quite like a cell phone locator does in that respect. Of course, if you're a hotshot hacker and you really know your way around computers, you could find the physical location of a computer somehow. But even your midlevel hacker and troublemaker can't find a name and an exact physical location with only an IP address.