Is it legal to collect, store, and use the IP addresses of businesses for solicitation? From what I've gathered, it is legal to collect, store, and use the IP addresses of individual persons AND businesses for solicitation, but I want to make certain of this. Also, what is your forecast for this issue? How long do you think it will be until it is made illegal to collect, store, and use business IP addresses? Any help will be greatly welcomed. Thank you!
Selling personal information is not allowed. It is illegal, without consent. If you collect IP of users on your site, you should have a clear privacy policy about that. Ie. Facebook does that. And some of their application developers do collect your information. But FB claim that your information is anonymous, is only used within the FB system. Collecting it from willing users (ie. users entering your site) is allowed. Selling it without permission is illegal.
As with everything, it depends what country you are based in. In general IP address are considered personal information and therefore to store them you must inform the users that this is occuring via T&Cs on the site or privacy policy. The reality however is that IIS, Apache and other web servers store them in their logs even if you as the site owner aren't explicitly wanting to or use if for anything. If you are in the UK you would want to check to see if you need to register with ICO, its a 5 minutes job and costs £35 ($50) per year (some would argue its a stealth tax) until your turning over more than £30m
Thank you, Gentlemen! I greatly appreciate your help. I am not involved in selling IP addresses, but I do use them to better understand who my visitors are and where they are located. I track only business IPs that are registered in ARIN. Do any of you think it will be made illegal within the next couple years to collect and store the IP addresses of businesses? Thanks.
It is highly unlikely that it would be, in my opinion, as you would then have to get every installation of IIS, Apache etc changed as by default they store them.
I think if you are involved in buying/selling you can store user IPs in your database to report fraud. Its just my opinion and not sure what legalities are there in this! Most payment processors collect IP addresses along with payment order and you will be given the info.