I am *really* not a computer guy, and this question has kinda been on my mind since I found out about doxxing/IP grabbers ages ago. I didn’t really care too much, since I am not a fan of putting people in danger over twitter like a dickhead, but can someone tell me generally why it’s a serious issue if someone leaks your IP?
Since this sounds as if I’m trying to doxx someone: I’m posting after searching my own IP & I found that most websites pinpointed my address to a different country entirely?? (Still a country next to mines, but definitely more than far away enough for me to care if mines were leaked). Famous people who get doxxed online always move away for safety, so I’m really confused why that is when the website I used to check my own IP address on a bunch of places online at once usually all ended up being a whole country off.
Even though I shouldn’t need to state this outright; **don’t give a step-by-step guide on how to doxx people**. I don’t want to know that. I just want to know why IP grabbing is such a big deal and how doxxing is possible vaguely in a way that forces people to move cities.
In: Technology
You don’t “have an IP” – your ISP lends one to you, temporarily and tomorrow they may lend you a different one, or they may keep using the one you have today. It’s not yours, it’s theirs. This often means that “geo-ip” at best gives you a general area, like a city – it’s not an address, it’s definitely not yours. And even that isn’t always right. Depending on how your ISP’s infrastructure is setup, your “global ip” may show up in a different state. You need a time span to be able to force the ISP to show which address used it through a court order – and even when that happens, it’s your address – it doesn’t indicate it’s you.
For DOXXing you need a lot more than this. Your identity online is a lot more than your IP. Standard browsing tells about your browser, the computer you’re using and with standard session cookies you can often extract identity information (not your password). That’s some of the information hackers steal to sell, or worse the web-site you’re visiting sells about you.
So when you get your “signature” from many different sites you can put together a profile of that one computer’s web-sites. That’s what markets and data minors do, sell and why what you think is free, actually costs you quite a bit – your information.
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