Can You Be Tracked By Your IP Address?

With people around the world being arrested by their governments for things they write on the Internet, children in the US being expelled for Twitter remarks, and the general lack of privacy the Internet affords us nowadays, there is increasing concern about whether you can be physically tracked by your computer or smart phone's IP address.

First of all, what is an IP address? IP stands for "Internet Protocol" and is the address of your Internet-enabled device. (Read: computer, smart phone, Wii, or anything that accesses the Internet) While IP addresses can and do change, you can also tell them to stay the same. An IP address is four sets of number ranging from 0-255 and is separated by periods, for example: 127.0.0.1, and there are two different kinds: public and private. The public one is the one used when you access the Internet, so this is the one I'll be using in this discussion.

In the TV shows, the high tech cop simply hops on a computer, goes to a complicated looking screen with a black background and green text, types in some cryptic commands, and a detailed map pops up showing the person's street, building, and then their apartment. This is almost, kind-of-sort-of, but not really how it happens. What really happens is this:

•  The police acquire a suspect's public IP address
•  The police can figure out the ISP (Internet Service Provider) from that.
•  They go to the company that gave out that IP address, and request/subpoena the information linked to that address
• They now have the billing information for that IP address.

Here are some catches, though:

• That's only the billing address, it doesn't prove who was using that computer.
• It can take days for an ISP to get the information to the police.
• If someone's tech-savvy, and knows what they're doing is bad, they're probably masking their IP via a proxy.

Which leads me to the PTD- what is a proxy?

Practical Tip of the Day:
If you're concerned about your privacy, or being tracked, there are plenty of websites that let your surf the web via a proxy. A proxy jumps you around a bit and gives your a different IP address so when you visit a webpage, it sees that you're in London, not in Chicago. While this can be helpful for those concerned with Internet privacy, it is not a necessary step for most people, and regularly using a proxy can be viewed as a sign that you do things online that you "don't want people to know about."