How to find someone's address with an IP Address?

How to find someone's address with an IP Address?

Learn how you can estimate someone's address with an IP geolocation technology and understand its limitations.

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2 min read

It is only possible to estimate someone's address with an IP address but not get accurate household or street-level information. In order to get an exact location you will need to use the device's native geolocation APIs like HTML5 Geolocation API on web browsers or respective location services on Android/iOS.

If you really need to use an IP address, you can use free or paid IP geolocation tools to get comprehensive locality information from the user's IP address. However, this geolocation data is an estimation of the location derived based on various publicly available Internet Registry data, ISP-shared data, user-submitted data and Internet network data. Each IP geolocation service has its own methods which determine their accuracy.

For example, using BigDataCloud's IP Geolocation API, you get the following geolocation data for an IP address = 50.121.88.71

"location": {
      "continent": "North America",
      "continentCode": "NA",
      "principalSubdivision": "Indiana",
      "isoPrincipalSubdivision": "Indiana",
      "isoPrincipalSubdivisionCode": "US-IN",
      "city": "Fort Wayne",
      "localityName": "Fort Wayne",
      "postcode": "46807",
      "latitude": 41.06,
      "longitude": -85.16,
      "plusCode": "86HP3R6Q+2X",
.....
}

and using MaxMind's Free Ip Geolocation, you get :

US    Fort Wayne, Indiana,
United States, North America 46802    
41.0722, -85.1545

You can note that though both tools have identified the same city, but the suburbs are different. If you try other IP lookup tools, you may get a different city or even a different country or continent.

The only possible known way of getting an accurate location of an IP address is by contacting the Internet Service providers (ISP) who are allocating these IP addresses. But, this is an extreme measure to identify someone's location and requires legal approval. Even then, it is not 100% guaranteed.

On the other hand, if the user is using VPNs/proxy service or is using the cellular network, your location data can be off by many miles or completely wrong. They are more difficult to geolocate compared to your home internet.

Nevertheless, an IP address plays a vital role in helping businesses serve localised content and online advertisements, geo-block users to access unauthorised content, and prevent online scams such as credit card fraud.