What information about a person can you obtain from their IP address?

I’d say not much, if you’re not in law enforcement. When we look up IP addresses, we only get a general location. No street address, no names.

I may be wrong here, but the IP addresses generally belong to the service provider the person is using. unless they are static IPs, you will learn mostly about the service provider that offers them, not the person themselves.

Hope this helps.

They can learn how many different Fluther accounts you’re using!

If you look up the IP address you can see who is the service provider. You can get their address. The customer usually lives in the same region as their ISP.

Law enforcement can get all of the information that you list and probably more. The average person can get nothing.

You can get a name and phone number with someone’s IP address. Are you supposed to? Probably not.

…an I.P. address can be traced to a specific Internet service provider, and with a subpoena, the Internet provider can be forced to identify which of their customers was assigned a particular I.P. address at a particular time. That is how the recording industry has been identifying and suing people who use file sharing programs…

NY TImes – July 7, 2008 – One Subpoena Is All It Takes to Reveal Your Online Life

If the IP address is known you can get ISP, Name, Address, etc

Without a subpoena you can get the ISP.

You will usually need a subpoena to get the ISP to provide more details.

You can tell their internet provider but not necessarily the town they live in. Because of dynamic IP addresses, my location is pinpointed at various locations within around 150 miles of my actual location – an area that encompasses several other major cities besides my own.

Law enforcement agencies can contact your internet service provider to get your name, address and account details but this is not available to the public. So, a hacker can’t find you from just your IP address, but you can’t rely on it to hide from the police.