What is the scariest or most disturbing thing to ever happen to you on the internet?

You're right, it is bullshit--because what /u/ZeProdigyX mentioned is almost completely impossible. Unless you have a personal website hosted on your IP that people can read your details on, you can't find name, address, email, or anything else from an IP.

You can learn some more things from a browser's HTTP headers

Let's take a look at my IP & HTTP details and see how far we can get.

My useragent string: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:37.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/37.0

From this, we can see I'm running Windows 8.1 64 bit edition. I'm using an up-to-date copy of Mozilla Firefox version 37, probably with no (or only minor) addons installed. Addons commonly change the useragent string, though I could have hand-edited the useragent string to remove the edits.

You can also see my referer URL, google.com.

My IP address: 129.137.215.237

What can we learn from this? Firstly, from WHOIS, the IP block 129.137.0.0/16 is registered to the University of Cincinnati. I'm probably a student or faculty at UC, then. Performing a reverse DNS lookup yields the domain name "oldchemwireless-pat.uc.edu". This lets you know I'm in the Old Chemistry building at UC. (Don't worry, unless you yourself set something like this up, or connect from your school like I did, people can't even get details like this.)

That's all you can learn from technical data. You can't find people's home addresses, names, or phone numbers. Now on to the more "social research-y" side.

From my knowledge of IT here, you can conclude I have at least a basic working knowledge of computers. You can look up UC's majors and learn that I probably (1) have an office in old chem and am a mathematics or computer science professor or (2) am a student in one of those two fields. Let's assume that I've posted my first name and age on this account at some time past, at "John" and 39. (Not real info--I'm a student.) From this, you could find out that I'm probably a professor. You could then look through UC's directory for CS or math professors named John who were born in 1976. This is where people mess up--posting too much random bits of information, that, taken together, can give away your identity. Your IP does not give this out.

Posted on a throwaway because identifying information on my main account would let you know who I was.

/r/AskReddit Thread Parent