Jason Slater Weblog

The Google Public Policy Blog (http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/) recently posed the question: Are IP addresses personal?

This is an interesting question and one which I’ve heard before and I’m pretty sure will crop up again. It is the sort of question that is always likely to generate a lot of debate. In my opinion the area is a bit grey as I think there is  a portion of IP addresses that are probably personally identifiable but a large portion that are not.

For example, there are more than one person in our household so identifying a particular individual from a static IP address (if we had one) on our broadband connection would be difficult, also I think that people tend to use the Internet from different places, home, work, cafe, mobile phone, library and very few of these are likely to be identifiable to a particular individual. Also, visitors often visit the house and use the computer or ask me to look up information on their behalf.

In comparison, I have one of those supermarket points cards which has an identifier that is identifiable personally to me and this large supermarket chain probably tracks everything I buy at the shops. Does  it worry me? A little. Will I stop shopping there because of it? No.