Will an ISP disclose the current IP address of a customer?

I’m puzzled by the fact of blacklisting of my public IP address by a particular company’s server.
It may be just a coincidence, but looks really strange. I cannot ping it and I have no web access to their web site. Everything is perfectly working with a proxy or from a different IP address (workplace, cellular data etc.).

A couple of days ago that company’s rep came to my house to provide a work estimate for home remodeling. It ended up with a high pressure sale attempt: they offer 20% discount if I sign the contract today. They don’t explicitly disclose, but I know (and noticed on a page of the contract) about the right to cancel within 3 days. So, I was calm and signed it. Yesterday I tried to open their web site to cancel or at least to find the corresponding contact information. It’s a legitimate company, to doubts. However, I found their web site is not accessible. Then I realized that it’s working when a different originating IP address is used. I submitted a cancellation request and got an email reply.
 
Will an ISP disclose the current IP address of a customer?
Dutch ISPs won't due to privacy laws we have. Definitely not without a court order. Don't know the US privacy laws that well enough, but I gather they're pretty sh*t in comparison.

It ended up with a high pressure sale attempt: they offer 20% discount if I sign the contract today.
We also have laws against this type of sales tactics.
 
Don't know the US privacy laws that well enough, but I gather they're pretty sh*t in comparison.
No doubts about that!

I wonder if there exist some security/privacy holes. The ISP is Comcast, and a possibility of reverse action was reported some time ago: it's possible to get a customer's street address by knowing the current IP address.
 
If Law Enforcement wants it they will hand it over. They may or may not have to have a Court Order. It depends on who is on each end on how strictly they stick to guidelines.

I have it on first hand information gained by experience the Govt as a whole is more crooked than you could imagine. I don't worry about anything I do anymore.

If disgruntled sales rep Reprisal Roy calls and asks what that guys number that stiff me on a sale and that's enough to get your IP, then I guess I could call, too.

Are you sure there's no other way they could have gotten it?
 
did you have any email with them before the visit?
your ip is visible in the headers
did you let the salesman use your wifi ?

also if you open an email from them on most clients and they have tracking 'pixels'
 
no idea but somehow hard to believe the ISP would disclose your IP address. I am not familiar to US things let alone Comcast but usually large corps have a hard time to identify such data for their own use let alone giving it to others on such short notice.
 
He couldn't find out about you from your name on a Google search? Do you have a website that links back to you through whois?

I'd just come right out and ask why my IP is banned. Tell them it seemed like they might have been trying to make it difficult for you to cancel your contract.

Now you hold all the cards. You already cancelled so there isn't much they can do. You could Yelp them a bad review (under someone elses name), Twit them up a Twitter Mob, and even threaten to complain to the BBB.

Hold it right there. Wait just a minute now...are you guys hackers? Or are you just quackers?
 
He couldn't find out about you from your name on a Google search? Do you have a website that links back to you through whois?
My residential service's IP address is not static, there are no links to it, and it's not used for any web site (not even with a dynamic DNS).
 
Don't be too quick to rule out a coincidence. Causation and correlation are two different things. Just because you happen to have problems accessing their website it doesn't necessarily have to do with anything. That website may have been inaccessible for a long time, you've never visited it before, so you never noticed it.
 
I am not sure what the point would be: there is so many ways of hiding ISP issued IP address and in effect this supposed attempt at blocking IP address was unsuccessful.
 
there is so many ways of hiding ISP issued IP address and in effect this supposed attempt at blocking IP address was unsuccessful
I'd assume that pressure-sales companies' target audience won't even think about that.

By the way, they use the same ISP as me:
IP Details For: 50.205.210.48
Decimal: 852349488
Hostname: powerhrg.com
ASN: 33261
ISP: Comcast Business
Organization: Comcast Business
Services: None detected
Type: Corporate
Assignment: Likely Static IP
 
I got a Cloudflare page yesterday that first made me think someone had come to their senses when I could not reach their site.

But it was just a little network congestion and a page refresh later cleared that up. I wanted to make sure the Facebook logout page they acquired was still up before I contacted Facebook to let them know.

He lives in the same town in Bulgaria my website is hosted in. I need to ask them if he did any work for them. Let somebody else to the work before I have no choice but to commit to doing it myself.
 
IP-addresses are only given free of order by a judge.
For a company it can also be an idea to not be reachable when they have too many complains.
A secured paper mail with validation is the best to handle contracts.
 
I don't think full IP's should be available to websites. The laws can only provide linking that IP to a person's Internet account, but whose to say someone doesn't get around this.

I like to know if the same person returns, and their vicinity, out of curiosities, but I don't need to know much else.
 
Any website you visit can "see" your IP address in the header. Languages like PHP provide language primitives for sniffing it out, i.e., $_SERVER['REMOTE_HOST'].
 
It's Comcast, frequently voted most hated company in the US, so a bad review probably won't make a difference. They have a monopoly in many areas--like most ISPs, they bribe congress to get these deals. For those in other countries, it's completely legal to bribe congress, it's called lobbying. Basically they promise campaign donations. It's one reason we have such poor Internet compared to other wealthy countries. It wouldn't surprise me if you've agreed, when you sign up with them, to allow them to sell your information.

That being said, it's probably pretty simple to find out someone's IP address. We don't have the same privacy laws as Europe, and many companies have some clause allowing them to sell your information when you buy from them. It's gotten a little better in the last few years, you can now, often with great difficulty, opt out of many of them.
 
Ah, Comcast... yeah, that's an ISP I use at my place. yeah, their sales department is annoying - nobody seems to know what IPv6 even is, everybody's trained in high-pressure sales tactics, and they push higher-priced plans on you. But if you can see through that, and in return, press them for technical details like how to check on bandwidth limit, or why ping is not going though - they just shrink back. Back in the day, I did have better luck chatting online about those topics - my conversation got referred to a more senior staffer who was not completely clueless.
 
Someone told me. Their words, and they do often get things wrong.

He said, he asked about Xfinity, and they didn't install it, and gave him a bill. He said he was outside, early in the morning, and an Xfinity technician shows up to work on the pole. He asked what he was doing, and the technician left. Then the next day, a technician showed up, to be on the pole and he asked what he was doing, and he left again. Supposedly, the technician intended to pretend to install it, so a bill can be charged for a non-service.

According to him, they gave him a bill, for a service he never used, because he asked about their service. A technician shows up twice, and has nothing to do but show up.


Aside from this, Comcast's tactics are racial, they give false charges to Hispanics, perhaps in the hopes that some are illegal immigrants, and won't challenge it. It's predatory, and perhaps their racial system, if it was gambling on who was illegal because of their last name, became racist. They do this to American citizens whose families have been Americans for generations.
 
I once got a bill for just talking to an insurance company. After fruitless email exchanges, and their threats to refer the bill to a collection agency, I drove 15 miles to next town where the office was, barged into the office with email printouts, told them that I never said OK to anything, and demanded a piece of paper that actually says that I don't owe them anything. A week later, I received that very piece of paper from the company's regional management office - not the one I went to even. Yeah, predatory practice, but in reality it turns out to be just a bluff if you're stubborn enough to not suffer nonsense.
 
An insurance broker misrepresented the contract she sold me as having $0 premium.

I asked her what that $13 a month by the signature line was and she said my something or other jive talk would pay it.

Then I got a notice from the Social Security Admin stating they had been authorized to withdraw $13 a month from my check starting next month, and a bill from the Insurance Company wanting me to pay $13 for the first month SSA wouldn'y cover.

I didn't watch Judge Joe Brown, Judge Judy, Peoples Court and the rest of the Judge shows all afternoon for years and not learn anything.

I called them up, got a Teir 1 representive that was almost as good as I was, and I liked that a lot. But I had her on a legal point she could not overccome:

Paying that bill would be like agreeing to the contract, and that was not the contract I agreed to.So you might as well take me to Court now because I will never pay it. I would love to argue this case in court and send your best Attorney, because I'm up to it.

I never got my day in court or another bill from them. I switched Ins Companies and they put a Fraud investigation on her, but I don't think anything came of it.

I have another chance but filing your own case in Federal Court is a feat in itself and arguing it beyond me now.
 
Most of the time, it turns out that someone is not willing to own up to not paying attention to details. Taking such people to task takes effort on your part, and you gotta have a watertight case on your end of things.

I once got a double bill from a medical office - I prepared both bills, got in line, and the receptionist behind the window just said that it will take the rest of the day to verify that. I said, OK, I'll wait. I was holding up a pretty big line of people for that, but fortunately, they were understanding of my situation. The receptionist found everything in less than half an hour, and corrected the double-billing. Everything fell into place after that.
 
Don't ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence. If you manage to actually reach a human at the company, they will probably have no idea why your IP address doesn't work.

Will an ISP disclose the current IP address of a customer?
In the US, that depends, on (a) the ISP, and (b) who is asking.

If the request comes from a court (warrant or subpoena), the answer is: perhaps. Some organizations (for example Apple) will go out of their way to legally fight the question, and only divulge information once they have convinced themselves that the question can not be legally squashed. Others will be more lenient.

If the request comes from a law enforcement organization but without court order, then it depends. If it comes from the national security apparatus, it won't even be a formal question, and they will get the answer

I think no ISP would divulge anything to a non-governmental entity. There are privacy laws in most states that prohibit that.

Now: All these rules are implemented by humans, and humans are notoriously unreliable. So think of the above as general guidelines, with lots of fluctuations.
 
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