The Home Secretary, Theresa May, has said the legislation would “require internet providers to keep internet protocol – or IP – address data to identify individual users of internet services”.

If an illegal service is used by someone – like pedophile web site or a terrorist chat room – the network logs can function as evidence linking the perpetrator to their offense.

But IP addresses alone don’t exactly pinpoint “people”, at least not the way they can be assembled right now. And internet providers wonder whether this signals they will need to modify how that they track users. One router can offer internet access to a number of computers via an identical IP address IP address logs are already generally kept by broadband suppliers for 12 months for residential properties and up to seven years for businesses.

The issue for the authorities is that several devices frequently share one IP address via both wired and wifi links to one router.

To put it differently, a lot of folks might be concurrently utilizing the world wide web with shared lodging via the same or an office logged IP address, which makes it difficult to understand who was behaving illegally.

This really isn’t a thing that broadband providers now track while it’d be useful for researchers to understand which MAC address was linked with each action.

The inquiry is whether the government needs investigators to begin by picking the info from the routers do so.

Public wifi operators do, yet, record the MAC addresses of kit using their facilities, meaning other and coffee shop, airport lounge wireless place logs can be utilized to flag special devices, assuming they can afterwards be tracked down.

ISPs warn, nevertheless, that since there is a MAC address editable, a user can only alter their settings after participating in an illegal action, to conceal their identity.

Cellular gateways, Handsets aren’t commonly shared and don’t need different routers to connect to 4G and 3G data services.

Thus, you might assume it’d comparatively easy to identify people from the IP address logs of a cellular telephone network. But that really isn’t the situation.

The main reason is that mobile phones connect to networks via gateways, which can entail 200 individuals sharing the same public IP address at the same time.

In order to “identify individual users”, as requested, the cellular telephone networks would additionally must begin accumulating additional data. There are lots of legal services that enable users to hide their online identities
Even in the event internet providers and the government do consent to enlarge their record-keeping without triggering a public backlash, there’s one added problem.

Offenders can use anonymizing services including virtual private networks (VPN) and Tor to prevent their IP address being linked to an illegal website in the very first place, thereby making the internet providers’ records inconsequential to any investigation.