693
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
693 points (99.9% liked)
Privacy
2020 readers
59 users here now
Welcome! This is a community for all those who are interested in protecting their privacy.
Rules
PS: Don't be a smartass and try to game the system, we'll know if you're breaking the rules when we see it!
- Be civil and no prejudice
- Don't promote big-tech software
- No reposting of news that was already posted
- No crypto, blockchain, NFTs
- No Xitter links (if absolutely necessary, use xcancel)
Related communities:
Some of these are only vaguely related, but great communities.
- !opensource@programming.dev
- !selfhosting@slrpnk.net / !selfhosted@lemmy.world
- !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !drm@lemmy.dbzer0.com
founded 5 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That depends on which groups play ball. IP addresses are geographically distributed, and since most people use VPNs (and Wikipedia disallows VPNs anyway), it's relatively easy to track an IP address to a geographic area. Further, companies buy IP blocks, so you can also usually figure out which ISP that IP address is associated with. If you happen to be near the area, you might be able to triangulate it further with latency checks, but you'd need understanding of how the network is laid out.
That gets you in the ballpark with publicly accessible information, and then it's just a matter of getting the relevant parties to connect that to an address or a name. If the ISP allocates them in a predictable manner, you may not need the ISP to narrow it down.
This mostly applies to IPv4, IPv6 is another beast entirely. But most people are still on IPv4 at home. For IPv6