Cunliffe,
First, my apologies. Second time today I've spent too little time wording a response to a forum posting and making it sound like I'm having a dig at someone when I'm not. So sorry about that, unintentional, I'll spend a few more minutes typing next time !
Generally speaking (and attempting to summarise a rather complex topic in a short post) :
IP addresses are there for the purposes of "routing", that is they provide a unique identifier for every possible destination on the internet. Depending on what service you have subscribed to, there are two ways in which you can be allocated an IP address, "dynamic" or "static".
With "dynamic", as is usually the default service for residential customers, your IP address is randomly selected by your ISP's equipment out of a large pool. There is no way for you or anyone else to predict what IP address you will be allocated, how long you will be allocated it for, and all the publicly available information relating to that IP address is in the ISPs name. Obviously the ISP keeps a log of who was allocated what when, so they can track you down if they receive a complaint or law enforcement warrant, but otherwise it's pretty much impossible for the average Joe to track you down.
With "static", your ISP allocates you a set of IP addresses, which remain yours as long as you remain a subscriber. For residential customers, most ISPs will respect the word of the Data Protection Act, and refer to you by simply your account reference number when registering your static IP address in the public databases, so only they and law enforcement can find out who you are.
If we asssume the worst case scenario that they put your name and address in the database, the only thing that can really happen is that a malicious website operator can see your static IP address has browsed their website and look up your name and adddress. But as I said earlier on, the real damage is done if you put your credit card or other information into a form on that site. Your name and address can be found in many other ways (e.g. directory enquiries, the government loosing a disk etc. etc.) and so on its own would not be much more of a risk than it would be if you were not on the internet at all.
That's my 2p worth anyway. I doubt I'm wrong, but willing to be proven wrong !
