Is it possible to find a user's location by IP address?
For example, I want to go to every cafe in my city that has WiFi and know what IP address they provide so that later I can check someone's IP and find out where they are. Can this be done? What could be wrong with this approach, how can you trick me and show some other IP?
PS Just think it would be great to have where you serve in every city :-).
Small update: I agree to privacy breach and so on. But I'm not going to use IPs and location if they don't want to. It's the same with organizations. Only if someone wants to tag in my IP DB, I will add it. So I believe there is no privacy breach. and coffee shops can benefit from this because when you write about how delicious their candy was, you know for sure if the person actually visited the cafe and might have tried it and how long ago it was. It's like I was there 2 days ago, tasted them, they are delicious. and you think he really was!
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It won't be reliable, I could use a VPN or proxy and you would find that IP instead of the one I got at the wifi cafe.
Also like others, you have indicated that you will be limited to the IP address of the ISP provided to connect to the store. I remember trying to find my location using this method. Although I was in Montreal, the IP location sometimes determined my location, like in Toronto. This was most likely because my ISP was relaying internal traffic to another endpoint on its own backbone. So I did appear online in Toronto, something other than that is part of a private network controlled by the ISP.
Another side effect worth mentioning, let's say that two of the coffee shops use the same ISP, both have DHCP, since this is likely to be the case, it is possible that the IP given to store A is will be in store B when the lease of IP addresses is renewed. Thus, invalidating any sequence from a home-generated database.
So the short answer is .. technically it is possible, but realistically there are very good changes if it is useless for the granularity level you want. If the stores were in different countries, you would have a better chance of getting eligible (the country that is), assuming of course that I am not tunneling my traffic elsewhere.
You can always hack your router and set some kind of packet binding in it ... harshly you haven't heard that; -)
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Many services provide this, for example http://www.ip2location.com/
The problem is that IP addresses are constantly changing. Even if you have up-to-date information, you really only know where someone's ISP is, not their home. The ISP has the data, but they probably won't share it.
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You can try an IP address locator . You can use this PHP code to get the location programmatically -
$tags = get_meta_tags('http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm?GetLocation&template=php3.txt&IpAddress=195.252.12.12');
print $tags['city']; //City Name
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Many users don't even have an external IP address - they all use the ISP's gateway IP address. In this case, the IP can at best be correlated to the location of the gateway rather than the location of the user.
If the user has an external IP address, the service will not provide information to do so, as this is a violation of privacy. You will need a court order to obtain this information.
For your problem, if every cafe has a fixed range of IP addresses, you can actually write them down - just go in, use your Wi-Fi, and write down the address. Once you have gathered enough data, you can try to output if there is a useful pattern. Again, it's possible that all stores of the same brand will have a centralized pool of addresses leased to each user, and then you're out of luck.
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