# Will an ISP disclose the current IP address of a customer?



## aragats (Jun 17, 2021)

I’m puzzled by the fact of blacklisting of my public IP address by a particular company’s server.
It may be just a coincidence, but looks really strange. I cannot ping it and I have no web access to their web site. Everything is perfectly working with a proxy or from a different IP address (workplace, cellular data etc.).

A couple of days ago that company’s rep came to my house to provide a work estimate for home remodeling. It ended up with a high pressure sale attempt: they offer 20% discount if I sign the contract today. They don’t explicitly disclose, but I know (and noticed on a page of the contract) about the right to cancel within 3 days. So, I was calm and signed it. Yesterday I tried to open their web site to cancel or at least to find the corresponding contact information. It’s a legitimate company, to doubts. However, I found their web site is not accessible. Then I realized that it’s working when a different originating IP address is used. I submitted a cancellation request and got an email reply.


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## SirDice (Jun 17, 2021)

> Will an ISP disclose the current IP address of a customer?


Dutch ISPs won't due to privacy laws we have. Definitely not without a court order. Don't know the US privacy laws that well enough, but I gather they're pretty sh*t in comparison.



aragats said:


> It ended up with a high pressure sale attempt: they offer 20% discount if I sign the contract today.


We also have laws against this type of sales tactics.


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## aragats (Jun 17, 2021)

SirDice said:


> Don't know the US privacy laws that well enough, but I gather they're pretty sh*t in comparison.


No doubts about that!

I wonder if there exist some security/privacy holes. The ISP is Comcast, and a possibility of reverse action was reported some time ago: it's possible to get a customer's street address by knowing the current IP address.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Jun 17, 2021)

If Law Enforcement wants it they will hand it over. They may or may not have to have a Court Order. It depends on who is on each end on how strictly they stick to guidelines.

 I have it on first hand information gained by experience the Govt as a whole is more crooked than you could imagine. I don't worry about anything I do anymore.

If disgruntled sales rep Reprisal Roy calls and asks what that guys number that stiff me on a sale and that's enough to get your IP, then I guess I could call, too.

Are you sure there's no other way they could have gotten it?


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## covacat (Jun 17, 2021)

did you have any email with them before the visit?
your ip is visible in the headers
did you let the salesman use your wifi ?

also if you open an email from them on most clients and they have tracking 'pixels'


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## aragats (Jun 17, 2021)

Trihexagonal said:


> Are you sure there's no other way they could have gotten it?


If I would let him connecting to my home network, but I didn't. Also, I'm using my own modem, not a Comcast's (which by default broadcasts a WiFi accessible by legitimate Comcast customers).



covacat said:


> did you have any email with them before the visit?


No, only phone calls.


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## covacat (Jun 17, 2021)

no idea but somehow hard to believe the ISP would disclose your IP address. I am not familiar to US things let alone Comcast but usually large corps have a hard time to identify such data for their own use let alone giving it to others on such short notice.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Jun 17, 2021)

He couldn't find out about you from your name on a Google search? Do you have a website that links back to you through `whois`? 

I'd just come right out and ask why my IP is banned. Tell them it seemed like they might have been trying to make it difficult for you to cancel your contract. 

Now you hold all the cards. You already cancelled so there isn't much they can do. You could Yelp them a bad review (under someone elses name), Twit them up a Twitter Mob, and even threaten to complain to the BBB. 

Hold it right there. Wait just a minute now...are you guys hackers? Or are you just quackers?


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## aragats (Jun 17, 2021)

Trihexagonal said:


> He couldn't find out about you from your name on a Google search? Do you have a website that links back to you through `whois`?


My residential service's IP address is not static, there are no links to it, and it's not used for any web site (not even with a dynamic DNS).


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## SirDice (Jun 17, 2021)

Don't be too quick to rule out a coincidence. Causation and correlation are two different things. Just because you happen to have problems accessing their website it doesn't necessarily have to do with anything. That website may have been inaccessible for a long time, you've never visited it before, so you never noticed it.


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## aragats (Jun 17, 2021)

SirDice said:


> Don't be too quick to rule out a coincidence


Of course, it could be a coincidence. Just trying to understand if such disclosure is feasible from a large company perspective.


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## Aeterna (Jun 17, 2021)

I am not sure what the point would be: there is so many ways of hiding ISP issued IP address and in effect this supposed attempt at blocking IP address was unsuccessful.


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## aragats (Jun 17, 2021)

Aeterna said:


> there is so many ways of hiding ISP issued IP address and in effect this supposed attempt at blocking IP address was unsuccessful


I'd assume that pressure-sales companies' target audience won't even think about that.

By the way, they use the same ISP as me:





> IP Details For: 50.205.210.48
> Decimal: 852349488
> Hostname: powerhrg.com
> ASN: 33261
> ...


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## Deleted member 30996 (Jun 17, 2021)

I got a Cloudflare page yesterday that first made me think someone had come to their senses when I could not reach their site.

But it was just a little network congestion and a page refresh later cleared that up. I wanted to make sure the Facebook logout page they acquired was still up before I contacted Facebook to let them know.

He lives in the same town in Bulgaria my website is hosted in. I need to ask them if he did any work for them. Let somebody else to the work before I have no choice but to commit to doing it myself.


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## Alain De Vos (Jun 17, 2021)

IP-addresses are only given free of order by a judge.
For a company it can also be an idea to not be reachable when they have too many complains.
A secured paper mail with validation is the best to handle contracts.


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## sidetone (Jun 17, 2021)

I don't think full IP's should be available to websites. The laws can only provide linking that IP to a person's Internet account, but whose to say someone doesn't get around this.

I like to know if the same person returns, and their vicinity, out of curiosities, but I don't need to know much else.


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## Vull (Jun 17, 2021)

Any website you visit can "see" your IP address in the header. Languages like PHP provide language primitives for sniffing it out, i.e., `$_SERVER['REMOTE_HOST']`.


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## aragats (Jun 17, 2021)

Vull said:


> Any website you visit can "see" your IP address in the header


In this case even ping doesn't go through for at least 2 days.


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## scottro (Jun 17, 2021)

It's Comcast, frequently voted most hated company in the US, so a bad review probably won't make a difference. They have a monopoly in many areas--like most ISPs, they bribe congress to get these deals. For those in other countries, it's completely legal to bribe congress, it's called lobbying. Basically they promise campaign donations.  It's one reason we have such poor Internet compared to other wealthy countries.  It wouldn't surprise me if you've agreed, when you sign up with them, to allow them to sell your information. 

That being said, it's probably pretty simple to find out someone's IP address.   We don't have the same privacy laws as Europe, and many companies have some clause allowing them to sell your information when you buy from them.  It's gotten a little better in the last few years, you can now, often with great difficulty, opt out of many of them.


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## astyle (Jun 17, 2021)

Ah, Comcast... yeah, that's an ISP I use at my place. yeah, their sales department is annoying - nobody seems to know what IPv6 even is, everybody's trained in high-pressure sales tactics, and they push higher-priced plans on you. But if you can see through that, and in return, press them for technical details like how to check on bandwidth limit, or why ping is not going though - they just shrink back. Back in the day, I did have better luck chatting online about those topics - my conversation got referred to a more senior staffer who was not completely clueless.


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## sidetone (Jun 17, 2021)

Someone told me. Their words, and they do often get things wrong.

He said, he asked about Xfinity, and they didn't install it, and gave him a bill. He said he was outside, early in the morning, and an Xfinity technician shows up to work on the pole. He asked what he was doing, and the technician left. Then the next day, a technician showed up, to be on the pole and he asked what he was doing, and he left again. Supposedly, the technician intended to pretend to install it, so a bill can be charged for a non-service.

According to him, they gave him a bill, for a service he never used, because he asked about their service. A technician shows up twice, and has nothing to do but show up.


Aside from this, Comcast's tactics are racial, they give false charges to Hispanics, perhaps in the hopes that some are illegal immigrants, and won't challenge it. It's predatory, and perhaps their racial system, if it was gambling on who was illegal because of their last name, became racist. They do this to American citizens whose families have been Americans for generations.


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## astyle (Jun 17, 2021)

I once got a bill for just talking to an insurance company. After fruitless email exchanges, and their threats to refer the bill to a collection agency, I drove 15 miles to next town where the office was, barged into the office with email printouts, told them that I never said OK to anything, and demanded a piece of paper that actually says that I don't owe them anything. A week later, I received that very piece of paper from the company's regional management office - not the one I went to even. Yeah, predatory practice, but in reality it turns out to be just a bluff if you're stubborn enough to not suffer nonsense.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Jun 17, 2021)

An insurance broker misrepresented the contract she sold me as having $0 premium.

I asked her what that $13 a month by the signature line was and she said my something or other jive talk would pay it.

Then I got a notice from the Social Security Admin stating they had been authorized to withdraw $13 a month from my check starting next month, and a bill from the Insurance Company wanting me to pay $13 for the first month SSA wouldn'y cover. 

I didn't watch Judge Joe Brown, Judge Judy, Peoples Court and the rest of the Judge shows all afternoon for years and not learn anything.

I called them up, got a Teir 1 representive that was almost as good as I was, and I liked that a lot. But I had her on a legal point she could not overccome:

Paying that bill would be like agreeing to the contract, and that was not the contract I agreed to.So you might as well take me to Court now because I will never pay it. I would _love_ to argue this case in court and send your best Attorney, because I'm up to it.

I never got my day in court or another bill from them. I switched Ins Companies and they put a Fraud investigation on her, but I don't think anything came of it.

I have another chance but filing your own case in Federal Court is a feat in itself and arguing it beyond me now.


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## astyle (Jun 17, 2021)

Most of the time, it turns out that someone is not willing to own up to not paying attention to details. Taking such people to task takes effort on your part, and you gotta have a watertight case on your end of things. 

I once got a double bill from a medical office - I prepared both bills, got in line, and the receptionist behind the window just said that it will take the rest of the day to verify that. I said, OK, I'll wait. I was holding up a pretty big line of people for that, but fortunately, they were understanding of my situation. The receptionist found everything in less than half an hour, and corrected the double-billing. Everything fell into place after that.


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## ralphbsz (Jun 17, 2021)

Don't ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence. If you manage to actually reach a human at the company, they will probably have no idea why your IP address doesn't work.



> Will an ISP disclose the current IP address of a customer?


In the US, that depends, on (a) the ISP, and (b) who is asking.

If the request comes from a court (warrant or subpoena), the answer is: perhaps. Some organizations (for example Apple) will go out of their way to legally fight the question, and only divulge information once they have convinced themselves that the question can not be legally squashed. Others will be more lenient.

If the request comes from a law enforcement organization but without court order, then it depends. If it comes from the national security apparatus, it won't even be a formal question, and they will get the answer 

I think no ISP would divulge anything to a non-governmental entity. There are privacy laws in most states that prohibit that.

Now: All these rules are implemented by humans, and humans are notoriously unreliable. So think of the above as general guidelines, with lots of fluctuations.


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## neel (Jun 17, 2021)

astyle said:


> Ah, Comcast... yeah, that's an ISP I use at my place. yeah, their sales department is annoying - nobody seems to know what IPv6 even is, everybody's trained in high-pressure sales tactics, and they push higher-priced plans on you. But if you can see through that, and in return, press them for technical details like how to check on bandwidth limit, or why ping is not going though - they just shrink back. Back in the day, I did have better luck chatting online about those topics - my conversation got referred to a more senior staffer who was not completely clueless.


I have two ISPs: Google Fiber Webpass (primary) and Xfinity Prepaid (backup). I (fortunately) don't live in a monopoly.

Webpass' support has been great, the best I had in an ISP. Support was able to point me to a network engineer for a TINY problem (that was just a DHCPv6 issue that a router reboot worked), and willing to use terms like "prefix delegation" in support messages. It's a microwave link, but it's a really good one.

In comparison, Comcast support doesn't even know what IPv4 or IPv6 is when I had issues with their modem's bridge mode having unreliable IPv4 (prepaid forces a modem), when non-bridge mode works fine. So I plan not to renew Xfinity Prepaid and just use a VPS as a VPN for a "second IP" (I can let this expire, no retentions call needed since it's "prepaid").

In my previous place, I had Wave Broadband's "Wave G" service, and it often gave me 10-20 Mbps despite me paying for Gigabit service. Wave's support wasn't nearly as bad as Comcast, but the Wave G network implementation does suck when compared toother Gigabit symmetrical ISPs (both larger and smaller companies), even AT&T's 802.1X is better in many ways.

A big reason why Comcast sucks (outside of being a "monopoly" in many areas) is their focus on sales. I heard Comcast puts their best reps on sales and retentions instead of tech support, no wonder why people hate them. Put the best on tech support and your ratings will go up.

As a main ISP, I'd happily take AT&T or CenturyLink VDSL2, or a good WISP over Comcast even if it means living with 50-100 Mbps or a even forced modem (well, unless the other ISP uses Carrier Grade NAT). I could get CenturyLink VDSL2 or Wave "Cascadelink" (both >100 Mbps but not Gigabit), but that would mean disconnecting my Webpass in my apartment since the Cat5 cables are shared (still beats my last place's "exclusivity" deals).


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## astyle (Jun 17, 2021)

neel said:


> 50-100 Mbps


I'm jealous... I only have 2 Mbps at best, this slurps in a 1 GB FreeBSD iso in half an hour.


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## aragats (Jun 17, 2021)

scottro said:


> many companies have some clause allowing them to sell your information when you buy from them


Comcast (Xfinity) Privacy Policy does explicitly mention IP addresses in the clause about what they collect. The clauses "what they share" and "with whom" are so vague, that they always can justify such actions.


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## Alain De Vos (Jun 17, 2021)

Language has a purpose.


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## ralphbsz (Jun 18, 2021)

Clearly, an ISP has to know and store your IP address. Duh, if they didn't, their system would break. "I had this customer connected two seconds ago, but I don't remember where ...", that's laughable.



aragats said:


> The clauses "what they share" and "with whom" are so vague, that they always can justify such actions.


I'm quite sure they are not as vague as you think. If Joe Random calls Comcast and gets your IP address, I'm quite sure you have grounds to sue, and would win. Now, whether you have the means and wish to sue is a different question.

Another issue is whether they unintentionally leak IP addresses. For example, let's say Comcast outsources their billing to a billing company (they probably don't, but let's just work through this as an example). If they were concerned about privacy, they should only tell the billing company the following: Mr. Aragats, lives at 123 Main St. in Whoville, from May 1st to May 31st used our "blazing fast internet" service, his account number is 123-456, and he owes us $98.76 for that. In reality, they might instead dump their whole service database on the billing company, and that will have details like the exact wiring configuration: you are physically connected to wire ABC-567, which is served by their switch in Whoville's suburb of Wheretown, your modem is a model Yoyodyne-555 serial number 6543, your phone number for customer contact is 555-1212, and your assigned IP address is 192.168.0.123. In theory, their billing contractor should honor the privacy of that information just as much as they do. In practice ... humans are on average stupid and unreliable.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Jun 18, 2021)

ralphbsz said:


> Now: All these rules are implemented by humans, and humans are notoriously unreliable. So think of the above as general guidelines, with lots of fluctuations.


Two years ago I was looking at nothing but medical sites and kept seeing a strange IP# at the sites I was visiting that wanted JS allowed in NoScript. I can tell which scripts will likely need to be allowed for minimal site functioning and noticed this right away. It was my ISP, Charter/Spectrum following me around. 

So I made a rule to prevent them from invading my personal space, called them up and confronted them, they plead ignorance and it soon disappeared: 

```
###Block Charter Spy
#block in quick log on $ext_if from 24.217.1.158 to any
#block out quick log on $ext_if from any to 24.217.1.158
```

Human beans run the Government. Some abuse the power their job position places in them. 

Then there are those who have lost sight of, and have failed, in their Mission Statement. Their sense of self-worth and reputation as a Professional more important to them than conducting themselves with the Professionalism they lost long ago. 

There was no sign the Captains and Mates Beauty Salon ever existed in HUD St. Louis Field Office ledgers because they went back 10 years to check the books and could not understand why there was no record.

Do I have to run that end of it, too? Of course there is no record of HUD approved Government Fraud starting in 1981 and ending with one question from me in 2017. They cooked the books, but they are not cut out to be criminals. They are too sloppy to get by me, but together they are more powerful than one person. 

Even my Neutron bombs didn't phase the Human Bean sub-species, but I'm not done deploying them:

Be sure to check the Second page for the Tenant roster. There are two tenants listed but over 50 apartments in the Tom Sawyer Townhouse.The Captains and Mates Beauty Salon was one and the other collected the rent. 

And in all that time nobody dared ask the one question I dared that put an end to over 35 years of Gubbermint Fraud:

"What do I have to do to rent an apartment so I can open a computer repair shop and run a business out of Public Housing like she does?"

Or incriminated themselves by answering like Admin did. On covert digital audio recording.


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