[masraum]

Originally Posted by KC911

Methinks you guys are WAY overthinking and over-analyzing this. What if wireless isn't part of the equation? It's just basic IP routing and subnet masking imo...oldE knows . I'm outta here...happy new year!

OK, so even simplified, there is a LOT of info/stuff that's got to come together to locate you down to the level of your house, or even within a 4 house radius.

Central office A has 2 Class C subnets assigned. They have a router that is performing the DHCP relay function for all of the folks in the area. There are 500 wires that show up in their office from the area. Those 500 wires hit the DSLAM and at any one time, because of DHCP any of those IPs could be going down any one of those wires and on different days, the IPs could be going down different wires. So, your house has to be within 5000 feet of the office for DSL to work (assuming copper phone wire, not fiber U-Verse or cable). The telco knows that they have those two class C subnets that are hosted off of that router, but your house could be 5000 feet in any direction from that router and is one of 500 other folks. That, and the IP is randomly assigned to different folks from time to time.

Do you think that the telco keeps track of which wire the IP is attached to and publishes that information to Google? Yes, if the telco wanted to track it down they could. Their DHCP servers have your router's mac address and may or may not have a username that's associated with your account. Do you think they mine their DHCP servers and publish that information for other customers to see?

Nope, it's not IP subnetting. That may be looked at, but it's far too vague to be used to pinpoint unless you've got systems designed to do it, and based on my work as a network engineer for a service provider and a few Enterprise businesses, I'm pretty sure, they don't look at the info unless they absolutely have to. If the FBI comes knocking, they have to be able to provide it, but it's just held in a database that never gets looked at.