Answer
- You can go to www.whitepages.com
- Or peoplesearch.com
- Or Privateeye.com
- AnyWho.com is a good way to find people or companies.
There are many ways to find out where someone lives:
- If I know someone's full telephone number, the long-distance prefix and area code shows what country and region a person's phone is from, which usually narrows it down to a few cities. Or I could just call the number and ask. Or I could use a "reverse number look-up service", and they can give me the name and exact address associated with that number, unless it's an unlisted number. Even if it is unlisted, sometimes people at the phone company will give out the address.
- If I know someone's IP address, I can use a "whois" service to discover who has registered that block of IP addresses. Typically that gives me the phone number and exact address of some ISP. There are several "ip location" services that give you a city name for an IP address -- typically that's the city the ISP is located in. That's how some web sites know what city I am in. Often ISPs recycle their IP addresses, so an ISP that serves several small cities may allow a person in one city to use one IP address for a while, and when they go offline, give that same IP address to someone else in a different city. The people who work at ISPs are typically more paranoid than phone companies, so even though the ISP knows what address was using a particular IP address on a particular day, they won't tell you unless you have a search warrant signed by a judge. Even then, you may discover that that IP address corresponds to an open wireless access point at some coffee shop, making it impossible to find the exact person.
- When loading pages featuring server-side code (eg. Perl, php, asp, etc), the website can see your IP address, computer name, city, the last page you visited, and other details provided by your operating system. In addition, whenever you visit a website, the owner or webmaster can pull the stats and find out what pages you visit, where you last visited, your IP, what browser you use, etc.
- Personal information provided on social networking sites (eg. Facebook or Twitter) can be used to approximate the location of an individual, allowing the person to further narrow the location, using increasingly specific searches.
- Pertaining also to the personal information on Facebook, people can find your Facebook account through first and last name look up, as well as with an email address.
- If you provide sufficient personal information in a form on a website, it is possible for the recipient of the form to use some/all of that information to ascertain your address.
