Hello FLAGRANT violation of my privacy. You morons.

[bladespark]

When you comment in a community* the community moderators and the owner of the post you commented on can now see your location. Country, state, and city. Which means that people living in small towns who do things like... oh... call out a scammer on their scammy posts, for one example I've seen happen a lot, can now be found. Physically. Where you live. By people who might have a reason to go and hurt them.

You can't turn it off. You can't opt out. It doesn't draw from the fields you voluntarily fill in either, far as I can tell it's pulling the info from your IP address. And it's retroactive so every comment you've ever made in any community EVER now has your real location attached to it.

Bra. Fricking. Vo. Livejournal. Bravo. If anybody gets hurt because of this I hope you get sued into oblivion. This is almost enough to make me leave lj, permanently and for real this time, even though this is my primary internet "home" and social hub.

Morons. What the HELL were they thinking of when they did this? WHAT THE EVERLIVING HELL.

(And yes, I know that by posting people's IP addresses they've effectively been doing the same thing all along. But there is a big difference between "If somebody knows how and wants to go through the effort they can see where you live" and "HERE'S WHERE YOU LIVE FOR ANY IDIOT TO SEE RIGHT NOW, NO EFFORT REQUIRED." That kind of thing puts ideas into people's heads. It begs for abuse. It's just pleading for somebody to do something stupid.)

*Update: Apparently it's not all communities. Since I don't own any communities to test with I'm not sure what settings are required, I'm hearing conflicting answers from different people. There's some protesting going on in the latest lj news post, but it looks like most people haven't noticed the change yet. LJ itself has said nothing at all about this, neither notification it was starting nor defense of it continuing.

Update again: They've removed the feature. And there is a poll (and good comments discussion) about the IP logging here: http://lj-feedback.livejournal.com/16181.html

Update some more: Oh GODS I'm glad they removed this. It told people specifically when you move/go on vacation. Ie. if you post from a new spot it displayed (New location(Formerly Old Location)) That is such a bad idea that I can't even come up with words for how much of a bad idea it is! And it means that you can't retroactively proxy it to fix the problem, as it will then say (proxy location(formerly real location)) WHAT THE HELL WERE THEY THINKING?

Yay, one more update: "Generally, when you run an IP addresses (past and present) through a search engine, it defaults to the largest town within a certain radius, thus preserving some sense of anonymity. What is being broadcasted on lj, however, is much more specific.

In one instance I entered an IP address from location x into a search engine and it showed my location to be ~20miles from x. LJ reported my location to be ~5miles from location x. (And, incidentally, the town lj announces is not even shown on some road maps.)"

From a user's complaint on the well-hidden post from livejournal that mentioned this "feature" in passing. (Which I finally dug out.)

Now will people please stop treating me like I'm some kind of idiot and admit that I had reason to be concerned? Thanks so much.

Comments

[harliquinnraver.livejournal.com]

not. cool. ever. at all. *shakes head* appalling.

[aburamechan.livejournal.com]

:c That sucks, even though I've never lived in too tiny of a city.
This is why I disliked facebook too. But I guess if someone had the time and patience to come find me based on my ip, I would probably be amazed.

[ekmahal.livejournal.com]

Could you do me the lovely of PM'ing me what turns up when I comment, hon?

[beavisfreak.livejournal.com]

Wow, I had no idea this was happening here. I hope nobody gets hurt because of this. :/

[mariahpixie.livejournal.com]

what! is it just in communities then??? omg that is awful :C

[draggo.livejournal.com]

I guess it's time for the IT dragon to post and networking is his specialty.

Trying to track down someone's physical address through the use of an IP address all I can say is "good luck" because you are really going to need it.

The IP address will definitely allow you to find the datacenter that has the gateway where the data packets leave the non-routable IP address subnets and are then translated to a routable IP address through the NAT protocol.

Something else to take into account is the use of the IPv4 protocol which has a very limited number of valid IP addresses. The various IP addresses used by the different ISPs will have their all of their IP addresses divided into seperate subnets. All of these IP addresses are then placed into a different DHCP pools which are then assigned to individual subscribers as needed.

The DHCP protocol will assign an IP address in the pool of available IP addresses. Then that IP address will be removed until it is no longer being used. In a one hour internet session you might end up going through 10 or more IP addresses without even knowing it.

If whoever is posting using a Static IP it would be much easier to track them down by using their IP address. It would still also be rather difficult to do though. Also a static IP address is much more expensive and are usually reserved for business and enterprise level accounts.

Typically data centers where the IP traffic is routed onto the public internet are usually not in the same city where the traffic is originating from unless you live in a large city such as Dallas. Sometimes the data center may not even be in the same state. That is very common for anything that uses a cellular network.

Regarding IP addresses I could easily get that from a very large number of sources such as email or IM. Also that is nothing new either.

Now if you really want to find out where someone lives there are FAR MORE effective and easier ways to do that. You would be surprised as to what is available through public records.

If you are really worried about someone getting your IP address hiding your own IP address is almost a trivial task. I am not going to give out any instructions on how to do that because it can be technically illegal depending on how you implement it.

Also I am certified in Network Security and working on moving into IT Security right now.

There is a LOT more when it comes to IP addresses.

[galadrieltypo.livejournal.com]

You're right, it's not all that difficult to pinpoint somebody with just their IP. There are a fair number of websites where you just put in the number and a finger will fall out of the sky and nail you.

[draggo.livejournal.com]

And the best way to fight back against this is to turn this "feature" into a big joke by making it display your hometown as some random city somewhere in the US.

[rimspace.livejournal.com]

Huh, is this set on a per-community basis, as a couple of communities I'm in appear to show nothing new.

[aurora77]

If someone logs the poster's IP address, they can do a lookup and possibly get a rough idea of where the poster is located. Sounds like LJ went the next step and now does that lookup for them. It's a little creepy, yes, but technically it's not really info they didn't have access to before. Most people just didn't used to bother doing the lookup.

[chiscringle.livejournal.com]

I know someone who put a widget in their signature that did that, but only to the people looking at it. So it'd tell you YOUR info. I've never been happy with that arrangement and this sounds like laziness combined with the sort of wide-eyed web 2.0 naivete that seems to plague sites like this. Users should control their own data.