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Blogspot: Is there a way to track a viewer's physical location/address?

phasesphases Posts: 255
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in PC & Mac Hardware and Software #1
If someone has a blog page, like on Blogspot, would that person be able to find out the physical location/address of visitors to their page?

Like say if I live in Birmingham and I went onto a person's blog page, would the owner of the blog be able to find out exactly where I live, like the full address or a specific area in Birmingham? Would they be given the IP address of their viewers/visitors?

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    DaedrothDaedroth Posts: 3,065
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    #2
    Possibly, but the person may be able to tell which area you are in, but it would more than likely come up as Birmingham, rather than a specific area such as Selly Oak within Birmingham.
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    degsyhufcdegsyhufc Posts: 59,251
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    #3
    Depends on the geolocation software being used.

    I go on a site and it says i'm in Scotland and lists a different ISP.
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    chrisjrchrisjr Posts: 33,282
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    #4
    phases wrote: »
    If someone has a blog page, like on Blogspot, would that person be able to find out the physical location/address of visitors to their page?

    Like say if I live in Birmingham and I went onto a person's blog page, would the owner of the blog be able to find out exactly where I live, like the full address or a specific area in Birmingham? Would they be given the IP address of their viewers/visitors?

    Any website knows the IP address of it's visitors, or can very easily find it. But all that will tell them is which ISP you use and where that block of IP addresses is registered to.

    What it will not tell you is where you actually are. Your ISP will know which IP address it has assigned to you but this information will not normally be passed on. And then probably only with the intervention of the law!

    Just google "IP address location" and you'll get all sorts of hits from sites who will happily tell you where they think you are. At least one thinks I'm somewhere in Northern Ireland, most think I'm in London. None of them are right though.
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    tdensontdenson Posts: 5,773
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    #5
    chrisjr wrote: »

    Just google "IP address location" and you'll get all sorts of hits from sites who will happily tell you where they think you are. At least one thinks I'm somewhere in Northern Ireland, most think I'm in London. None of them are right though.

    I've just done that (I'm in Leeds) and the ip locator on the site I used tells me I'm in Leicester, the email locator tells me I'm in Canada.
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    Esot-ericEsot-eric Posts: 1,293
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    #6
    In the UK this is unlikely to work because of the way most ISPs run on top of the BT Openreach network for the end-user connections, so any geolocation database of IPs is likely to point all your ISPs IPs to the ISPs actual location.

    If you're using cable, or some local ISP with its own IP allocation it's possible that the ISP has allocated certain ranges of IPs to certain areas, but i'm not sure if any ISPs in the UK do this.

    For cable users in the US you can often narrow the location down to the city of the user (15 years ago you could often narrow it down to the neighbourhood).
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